Review: Google Pixel Tablet

I was skeptical about the Pixel Tablet when Google first announced it last year. A $500 Android slate that magnetically attaches to a charging dock that can double as a speaker? Big whoop. It didn’t feel like a new idea. Heck, Amazon has long had a similar docking system that transformed its low-cost Fire tablets into Echo Show smart displays. Also, Google’s history with tablets is filled with misfires.

But over the past two weeks using the new Pixel Tablet, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it. I have had three Nest Hub smart displays in my home for more than three years—one in the bedroom, one in the entryway, and one in the kitchen—and I have rarely, and I mean rarely, ever touched their screens. My wife and I do frequently ask Google Assistant to deliver the weather report, control smart lights and the TV, and play music, but even still, the screen isn’t something I’ve found particularly useful, except for the embarrassing photos it displays 99.9 percent of the time. This is not the case with the Pixel Tablet.

I’ve placed the tablet and its dock near the couch where I can easily reach it, and it’s so much more inviting to use. I can still access all my smart home controls while it's docked, but I can take the tablet off the dock at any time to drown myself in an app if my partner’s watching another episode of The Ultimatum on the TV (don’t get me started on Vanessa). I can respond to notifications if my phone isn’t nearby, or scour through Google Maps for a dim sum place to visit on the weekend. It’s not a groundbreaking device, but the Pixel Tablet is a smart addition to any living room, and it’s a heck of a lot more useful than any traditional smart display.

The Pixel Tablet is an 11-inch slate with a matte nano-ceramic coating on its rear that feels nice to the touch. The bezels around the screen are kind of chunky, but they're uniform. I'm glad they aren't razor-thin because it would've made it annoying to hold the tablet without interrupting the screen. You get three color choices: Porcelain, Hazel, and Rose. (I chose Rose!)

It's an LCD panel, which is sharp and colorful with nice contrast. I rewatched Spider-Man 2 on Disney+ and it looked great (oh boy, yeah). The quad-speaker setup never felt lacking either. The tablet gets fairly loud. If you want to listen privately, there's no headphone jack, so you'll have to pair it with wireless earbuds.

As a standalone slate, the Pixel Tablet doesn't rock the boat with any top-end features. There's no OLED display, no 120-Hz screen refresh rate, no cellular connectivity option, no built-in stylus, and no keyboard accessory. You can still pair third-party devices with it. I'm currently writing this review on the tablet with the help of a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard.

But because there's no official keyboard cover, I'm using a lap desk as a surface, and Google's official Pixel Tablet case to keep the screen propped up at various angles. This case is essential as the tablet doesn't have a built-in stand. I wish there was one, like on the Surface Pro or Switch OLED. (Adding a kickstand would've interfered with the speaker hub, but more on that later.) The case is otherwise fine, though I'd have preferred the indent for the fingerprint sensor to be more spacious and accessible.

The hallmark of the Pixel Tablet is the software. Google has spent the past year polishing Android's tablet experience by updating more than 50 of its apps and encouraging third-party developers to do the same. That means apps utilize the larger screen space to show you more information and controls, like Gmail's two-pane view or Google Photos' desktop-like design. WhatsApp works as a linked device instead of forcing you to log out of your phone app and also has a two-pane view. My favorite new behavior is how Google Chrome defaults to showing desktop webpages instead of mobile websites, much like how Safari works on an iPad.

Naturally, you still have apps that don't have any tablet optimizations at all. Slack is particularly useless in its mobile design on a big screen, and Instagram is notoriously lackluster on tablets—even on the iPad. However, many apps that are optimized for Apple's platform, like Facebook and Twitter, aren't given the same treatment on the Pixel Tablet. They just show the mobile app with a giant black space on the side.

Still, the interface is much nicer to use than it's ever been on an Android tablet. There's a persistent taskbar on the homepage where you can store some of your most-used apps, and you can drag that taskbar up from the bottom of the screen while inside any app when you need to launch one of your faves. It's so easy to pull one of these apps to one side of the screen to launch another app in split-screen mode too; it's the mode I'm using right now to write this review. It is as multitasking-friendly as the iPad, or even new Android slates like the OnePlus Pad? No, but it's still plenty sufficient for light work. (Feature request: If you open a new tab in Google Chrome, please put the cursor in the URL bar already so that I don't have to manually tap on it.)

The hardware is powered by the Tensor G2 chipset with 8 GB of RAM, the same stack inside Google's Pixel 7 flagship smartphones. This means many of Google's smart features are available here, like Assistant Voice Typing, Now Playing, and Google Recorder, though I don't find 'em as useful as they are on a phone. It does mean you have access to Google's advanced image processing features, and the photos captured on either 8-megapixel camera on the front and back look pretty good for a tablet (as does the 1080p video in video calls).

Speaking of, if you pop on a video call in Google Meet and the tablet is on its hub, then you can automatically take advantage of Continuous Framing, which will try to make sure you're always in the shot, just like Center Stage on iPads. It works pretty well, but I don't know how many times I'll use this as the hub sits in my living room at an angle that it's awkward to make a video call. Most of the time, I'll probably be video calling when it's undocked (you'll just have to manually turn the framing feature on). Too bad the framing trick doesn't work in any app other than Meet.

The Hub that comes bundled in with every Pixel Tablet is swathed in fabric made of recycled plastic. It looks like someone broke off the speaker portion of a Nest Hub smart display. On its own, the dock is non-functional. Magnetically click the Pixel Tablet into its dock by lining it up on a set of spring-loaded pins, and the tablet will begin recharging. Any audio you're playing will automatically route through the superior speakers on the hub. Undocking has a tiny learning curve—the first time my wife tried it, the whole hub followed along and fell off when the cable was taut. I recommend holding a side of the tablet and tipping the top half backward. Once you nail that down, it works like a charm.

The speakers on the hub get loud enough to fill a medium-size room, and they sound robust, with surprisingly decent bass for their size. I found the max volume comparable to my first-gen Nest Hub, but the speakers on the Pixel Tablet's hub sounded richer to my ears.

In Hub Mode, you can have the screen display photos or choose from a few snazzy clock designs. When I called on Google Assistant, the array of three far-field mics in the tablet adequately picked up my voice from the other end of the room. My favorite Hub feature is the Google Home icon that you can tap on the lock screen. It opens up basic controls for your favorite smart home devices—thanks to Google's recent redesign of the Home app—and acts as a quick way to toggle on devices like fans, lights, and TVs.

You can also use this mode to look at the feed from a video doorbell or Wi-Fi security camera, but this feature is specifically disabled when the tablet isn't docked to prevent randos from looking at your camera feeds. Anyone can talk to Google Assistant when the tablet is docked, but only the primary user can get personal results, and they'll still need to authenticate with the fingerprint sensor to see those.

That brings me to one of the best parts of the Pixel Tablet: multi-user support. You can load up to eight different profiles on the tablet, and with a simple tap, the entire slate will switch to someone else's profile, complete with their custom apps, layouts, wallpapers, and widgets, all protected by their fingerprint. That includes kid accounts too, and there are parental controls to limit screen time and block apps and websites on accounts accessible by children.

I had my wife set up her profile in case she wanted to try it out. She rarely wants to try any gadgets that fly into our home. Color me surprised then: One day when I was playing a video game on the TV, she took the Pixel Tablet off the dock and started casting YouTube videos to the slate as she played The Sims 4 on her laptop. I was shook. The Pixel Tablet is the only tablet with built-in Chromecast, so you can cast pretty much anything like you would a smart display (except Netflix as it's not supported).

This has quickly become the way I use it too, since she's more often the one hogging the TV. I'll just … stop using my phone and use the much larger screen on the Pixel Tablet to browse Reddit (RIP Reddit Sync) or catch up on the news. I wish you could adjust the angle of the tablet when it's on the hub, but there is a Google-approved third-party attachment that enables this functionality for $25.

Perhaps my biggest concern is battery life. It's difficult to gauge this because I always put the slate back on the hub to recharge. Right now, after four hours of constant use, it dropped from 90 percent to 45 percent. I think it should be good enough for most use cases, though that battery performance doesn't seem particularly remarkable.

My issue is more to do with battery longevity. If it's constantly staying topped up, I expect the battery to degrade more quickly. Google has added some battery optimization software so that the tablet stops charging at 90 percent, which slows the creep of battery fatigue. But a year of use will tell how much the battery capacity changes with everyday surfing, streaming, docking, and charging. At least this tablet will be supported for a good length of time; Google promises it will get three OS updates and five years of security updates.

Before the Pixel Tablet came my way, I was miffed that Google didn't provide a stylus so people could doodle on it. I was also peeved that there wasn't a keyboard cover to easily turn it into a workstation. At least bundle in the kickstand case! I still think those would be nice additions, but this slate already feels like it's doing quite a lot in the home, and sitting on a dock or in your hands is where it feels most comfortable.