Google may be expanding its Pixel line of laptops into tablets with a report Monday that the company was looking to take the good fight to the Microsoft Surface.

According to Android Police, the Google Pixel C tablet, codenamed Ryu, will ship with a 10.2-inch display with 308ppi and a super-bright backlight capable of 500 nits. Under the hood and confirming it’s aiming for the premium market, the tablet is said to be powered by NVIDIA X1 quad-core processor and Maxwell GPU, supplemented by 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

Like the Microsoft Surface there will be keyboard accessories available for the device, although with slightly different finishes with one said to be aluminum, the other one leather, with both attaching to the tablet and charging automatically when closed.

Following the current design trend with Google devices, Pixel C is said to ship with USB-C support, although it’s not clear whether the Pixel C name derives from that, or the fact it will be the third device to be marketed under the Pixel name.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all though with the new device: unlike its predecessors it won’t be running Chrome OS and will instead ship with Android Marshmallow, the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system; the report notes rightly that while Chrome OS does have some built in functionality for touch screens, Android OS is built for this purpose from the ground up.

Surface killer?

Perhaps it’s the mention of the keyboard that does it, but there’s no question a 10.2 inch Google Pixel C immediately draws to mind the 10.8 inch Microsoft Surface Pro 3, and perhaps even the larger again 12.9 inch iPad Pro, which also gained immediate comparisons to the Surface when it was announced earlier this month.

Whether the Surface needs killing or not is, of course, another question: it’s a niche tablet in a wide market but one well received at the higher end of the market, but that’s the other point as well: the Surface runs a full copy of Windows providing full desktop/tablet cross functionality whereas although there are many fine apps available for tablets now they’re often just that: apps with limited capabilities compared to the desktop versions which mostly work with the Surface Pro 3.

Where’s calling no to a Surface killer at this stage, but it’s interesting to watch the emergence of tablets targeted at the high end of the market versus the usual downward trend in the space.

No firm date has been given for the new device other than it’s likely to be announced sometime later this year.

Image credit: Cote/ Flickr/ CC by 2.0