The team behind ’s new xel C tablet took to Reddit to answer questions about the company’s latest hardware.

The biggest takeaway is that some type of split-screen multitasking is on the way, which would solve a major pain point from our review. en asked about Andriod’s tablet optimizations, Glen Murphy (Director of UX for Android Chrome) said:

“’re working hard on a range of enhancements for Android in this form-factor – there are many things, like multi-window, that we’ve been spending a lot of time on – hopefully we can share more about this soon.”

Beyond that, however, we didn’t get a ton of new information or insight into many of the questions about the xel C, such as why the software seems woefully inadequate for such excellent hardware.

y this matters: The xel C is ’s effort to show off how Android performs on a large, productivity-focused tablet. st as the original Nexus 7 was ’s object lesson that a company could build a high-quality inexpensive Android tablet, the xel C tries to show Android can be ready for a world where the Surface o id o become the primary computer for many. But the road ahead does look rather long.

Many questions, few answers

There weren’t any substantial reveals from the conversation, which made it clear that there’s still a lot of work to be done. 

One innovation that didn’t bring to the xel C was some type of “double tap to wake” feature always-listening “OK ” detection. According to oduct Manager Tom, the latter is at least in the works.

“For double tap, we wanted to optimize for sleep battery life. The double tap drained the battery faster by leaving part of the touch screen enabled. If you use with the keyboard, it will wake when opened.  are working on always-on “Ok ” support for a future update.”

Another issue is the lack of tablet-friendly apps. Even many of ’s don’t take full advantage of the extra screen real estate. This is where hopes the xel C will push some developers to jump on board. Glen Murphy promised that they’re on the way.

“’re spending a lot of time working with developers to get better more awesome tablet apps, but it is definitely a chicken-egg problem, we think a key driver is awesome hardware (like the xel-C :).”

It’s a certainly a different strategy than what you typically get from Apple. ereas an Apple release is touted as metaphysical perfection, the xel C is more of a showcase for what the future could look like. But it needs to get here fast in order for Android to gain more traction in the tablet market.

The team also said the firmware is open source, the bootloader can be unlocked. On the hardware front, Displayrt support over B Type-C is coming, but there’s no timeframe.