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The Pixel Tablet: A Real Android Tablet for the End of the Internet, Not for the Folks Who Don’t Live in the Home (Is Google Back?

Google is officially back in the tablet business. After teasing it a year ago, the company has now announced the Pixel Tablet, a $499 slab that’s available for preorder starting today, May 10th, and will begin shipping on June 20th.

The Tensor G2 chip is found in the Pixel 7 lineup. It also comes with a magnetic charging dock, so you can use it as a de facto smart display.

And that really is the whole story with the Pixel Tablet: it’s a tablet designed for what people mostly use tablets for right now. The long-standing complaint against any sort of Android tablet has been a lack of properly optimized apps, and despite Google’s efforts on its own first-party apps, the Pixel Tablet likely won’t solve that problem. But if you just want to watch the latest episode of Succession while sitting on your couch, you likely don’t care that the Slack app looks silly on the Pixel Tablet’s screen.

A built in kickstand, and still support mounting on the speaker dock, are some of the features that the snap-on case for the Pixel Tablet has. This isn’t a tablets you buy to replace a laptop, but an accessories list made by the search engine. (You can, of course, pair a Bluetooth keyboard to it and the tablet does support USI 2.0 styluses, but Google isn’t producing either of those accessories.)

Adorning the tablet are four speakers, three microphones for video calls, and two cameras. The back of the tablets have a camera in the upper-right corner and one on the front where you should hold the device in landscape orientation. A fingerprint scanner is built into the power button to support login and biometric authentication.

The new Pixel 7 and 7 Pro have the same Tensor G2 processor found in both the new iteration of the device and the one released last year. It comes with 8GB of RAM and 128 or more gigabytes of storage. The battery can provide 12 hours of video streaming between charges and there is a wired charging port if you do not have a dock with you. But in further proof that Google expects most people to never take the tablet outside of the home, it’s only available in Wi-Fi-only configurations; there are no 5G or LTE options here.

That said, when the tablet is docked on the speaker, it can show a slideshow of images from your Google Photos albums just like the Nest Hub. It also has a quick access button to the Google Home app so you can control smart home devices, and it can accept voice commands from a distance for hands-free Google Assistant queries. The lock screen will not show your personal information, and the accounts that are set up will have to be unlocked to access them.

When mounted on the speaker dock, the Pixel Tablet looks an awful lot like the Nest Hub Max, a $250 smart display that Google released back in 2019. But make no mistake, the Pixel Tablet is an Android tablet and not a smart display — it runs completely different software and has different capabilities compared to the Nest Hub.

Bundled in the box with the Pixel Tablet is a magnetic speaker dock. It serves a number of purposes, among them being a place to store the device when it is not in use, a place to charge the battery, and a speaker with better acoustics than the speakers. It will work if you put the audio on the dock and play music or watch a video while on the dock. Pull the tablet off the dock while something is playing, and it will instantly switch to the tablet’s speakers.

The looks of the Pixel Tablet are relatively generic. It has an 11-inch, 16:10, 2560 x 1600 pixel LCD display, even bezels all around, and a matte back. It comes in three colors: white, dark green, and light pink, with the dark green model featuring a black bezel. The aluminum frame of thePixel Tablet is similar to the one that was used for thePixel 5 smartphone.

Preordering Google Tablets from Amazon and Best Buy in the Run-up to June 20th: A Digital Photo Frame and a Smart Speaker Dock

Google is the only retailer currently accepting preorders for the Google Tablet, but it’s likely that you’ll soon be able to preorder it from Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers in the run-up to June 20th. We’ll update the post accordingly when they publish their listings.

The 11-inch tablet has a magnetic speaker dock, similar to the one used by the Google Nest Hub Max, that turns the slate into a smart display, though with different software. That means the tablet can function as a digital photo frame and a smart speaker, one you can use to control compatible smart home devices via the Google Home app or prompt using the “Hey Google” voice command.