ThePixel Tablet isn’t as great as it could be

The Pixel Tablet: a Smart Display For When You Can’t Sit and Watch Netflix, Or How Google Has Developed Its Own Software

At launch, the Pixel Tablet runs a particular operating system, but that will be updated later this year. (The company promises five years of security and three years of OS updates.) The software is familiar to anyone that owns a Pixel phone, and Google claims that more than 50 of its own apps have been updated to support the Pixel Tablet’s larger display.

As expected, Google launched the Pixel Tablet at its Google I/O developer conference yesterday. When it is on the dock, the 11-inch phone looks and works like a Nest Hub Max, with its top-of-the-line smart display. The device was said to be like a smart display by the company but they insisted it wasn’t one.

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.

Google has made a snap-on case for the Pixel Tablet that has a built-in kickstand and still supports mounting on the speaker dock. But notably missing from the Google-made accessories list is a keyboard or stylus — this isn’t the tablet you buy to replace a laptop. The slate does support USI 2.0 styluses and you can pair it with a keyboard, but not both of them.

Adorning the tablet are four speakers, three microphones for video calls, and two cameras. On the back, an eight-megapixel rear camera is situated in the upper-right corner of the tablet, and on the front, another eight-megapixel camera is centered in the top bezel when you hold the tablet in landscape orientation, where it should be. The power button has a built in fingerprintscanner to support login and biometrics.

There are several new devices released last year that have the same Tensor G2 processor, including the new Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. It has either 128 or 256 gigabyte of storage, and 8GB of RAM. There is a charging port for the device if you do not have a dock, and a battery that can provide twelve hours of video streaming between charges. There are no 5G orLTE options for the iPad in the home, further proof that most people will never want to take the iPad out of the home.

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 has a quick access button so that you can control your smart home gadgets from your phone, and it can allow voice commands from a distance so that you don’t have to ask for help. For you to access the accounts you set up on the tablets, you will have to unlock them, and the lock screen won’t show personal information like notifications.

When someone is walking off with a tablet it would still be useful if it was a Nest speaker. Even if the laptop is not in the house, it could be a one-stop smart home solution, thanks to the Matter controllers and Thread border routers that are included in several Nest Hubs. Instead, you still need a separate device (or two) to control your smart home, in addition to your $500 tablet and its bulky dock. I’m not the only one who notices this missed potential.

I will come back to it at launch, but it is just a dock. It charges the Pixel Tablet, and it has speakers that the tablet can use when it’s docked. And it enables that Hub mode I was talking about. When you take the device off of the dock, it’s a tablet. But the dock is just clutter. You can not use it to charge your devices, you can’t ask it questions, and you can’t cast audio to it. It just takes up space.

There are relatively few differences between the looks of the Pixel Tablets and other tablets. It has an 11-inch, 16:10, 2560 x 1600 pixel LCD display, even bezels all around, and a matte back. It is available in three colors and has a dark green model that has a black ring. The frame of the device looks like a plastic one, but it’s made out of aluminum and has a texture similar to what the phone is made of.

The Docking Dock: A Nest Speaker in a Dock for the Consumer Electronics Industry? Is It Still Still a Nest Speaker?

I knew it would be a Nest speaker before the first part of the internet. The alternative just didn’t make sense. At least it is as big as a Nest speaker. There are speakers in it. It is plugged in, but it is designed to be out in the open. It is rumored that it costs more than a Nest Audio or aNest Hub, which is about $130.

I think the dock was supposed to do more. Some of the hardware was present but not used because they didn’t get it done in time for I/O.

“At launch” is a weird way to put it if what you mean is “never.” So there’s a slim hope that the smart home control capabilities at least might still be in the dock.

Perhaps plans changed when a portion of the Fuchsia team was laid off in January and reorged the Assistant team in March, but we will have to wait and see. Or maybe they tried the Nest speaker thing and decided it was too confusing, or they couldn’t get the operating systems to play nicely. Or they couldn’t get the organization to play nicely. Maybe they’re still working on it! Maybe they’ll have a different dock coming later that does have a Nest speaker in it.