Google Pixel Tablet review: The tablet that transforms into a smart home display

The Pixel Tablet comes bundled with a charging speaker base

Android 14 on tablets uses the same Material You design as found on Pixel phones (The Independent)

Google’s new Pixel Tablet launched on 20 June. The first tablet designed by Google in more than five years, the Pixel Tablet starts at £599 and comes with a free speaker base.

The Pixel Tablet is specifically designed around this magnetic speaker dock, which turns it from a traditional 11in tablet into a useful smart home hub and entertainment display when you’re not using it.

When docked, the Pixel Tablet shows smart home controls, acts as a digital photo frame and responds to “Hey Google” commands, similar to the existing Google Nest Hub Max. The dock also doubles as a charging base, keeping the Pixel Tablet topped up and ready to use.

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Pop it off the speaker base, and it’s a tablet again, powered by Google’s powerful Tensor G2 chip and capable of running full-fat Android apps. The Pixel Tablet supports multiple users, so you see your own apps and data by unlocking the device with the fingerprint scanner in the power button, while your family gets their own profiles.

The speaker base is integral enough to the design of the Pixel Tablet that it’s actually not possible to buy the tablet by itself. Instead, every Pixel Tablet comes bundled with the charging speaker base.

How we tested

We’ve been using the Pixel Tablet for a few weeks, setting it up in our tester’s living room where it acted as a smart home hub for the rest of the apartment. Our tester’s home uses Google smart speakers and the Nest video doorbell, which integrate well with the Pixel Tablet.

We paid close attention to the display’s quality when streaming Amazon Prime Video and Netflix shows in bed, as well as audio quality when streaming music and radio shows. We also registered two users to the device, to test the ease of switching between different user profiles.

Google Pixel Tablet: From £599, Google.com

(Steve Hogarty/The Independent)

• Screen size: 10.95in
• Resolution: 2,560 x 1,600px
• Dimensions: 258mm x 169mm x 8.1mm
• Weight: 493g
• Cameras: 8MP front, 8MP back
• Storage: 128GB, 256GB
• RAM: 8GB

If you’ve got a Google Nest Hub and have ever idly imagined yoinking the display off the speaker base and taking it to the couch, the Pixel Tablet is designed with you in mind.

It’s been a while since Google has attempted a “proper”, iPad-style tablet. The most recent was the Pixel Slate in 2018, which ran on Chrome OS. That’s the operating system used by Chromebooks, with one foot in web-based apps and another in Android.

Unlike the Pixel Slate, the Pixel Tablet will run on the same operating system as Android phones. That means it fits more seamlessly into the Pixel family of devices – which now includes the Pixel 7 range, the upcoming Pixel Fold and the Pixel Watch – when it comes to sharing, casting, and seamlessly resuming videos and music where you left off.

(Steve Hogarty/The Independent)

The Pixel Tablet comes in three colours (porcelain, hazel and rose) and features a stylish (and notably non-techy looking) nano-ceramic coating. Helpfully for a device doing double-shifts as a smart home speaker and a tablet, the move away from a polished aluminium and glass casing should means it blends more easily into the living space.

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Google has optimised most of its own suite of apps to look and perform well on the 11in display, including Google Meet, which will offer HD video calling whether docked on a table or undocked in your hand. The improved Google Meet also gets a fun new 360-degree virtual background feature, making your fake beach backgrounds all the more convincing during meetings.

Additionally, entertainment apps such as Disney+, Spotify and Google TV have also been tweaked to look and perform better on the bigger screen.

The charging base station comes with every Pixel Tablet (Google)

Multi-tasking is possible with a split-screen mode, which lets you run two apps side by side. This sounds similar to how the Pixel Fold will work, allowing you to edit photos and documents on one side of the screen before dragging and dropping them into chats or cloud storage.

Snap the Pixel Tablet into the charging base and the display switches into hub mode, where it acts as a central control panel for all your various smart thermostats, light switches, doorbells and alarms. Unlike the Google Nest Hub – which runs on its own custom software – the Pixel Tablet will use the same Google Home app as the one found on Pixel phones. That means your settings, routines and favourite smart home devices will be synchronised across your various screens.

(Google)

You can also Chromecast to the Pixel Tablet while it’s docked – much like how you already can with the Google Nest Hub – meaning anyone on your home wifi network can cast your music and videos to it. Also like the Nest Hub, the digital photo frame will adjust brightness and colour to match the lighting of the room and appear more like a natural picture frame.

As a portable screen for entertainment, the Pixel Tablet looks great. Despite not being OLED (the always-on screen means Google has had to use an LCD panel, to avoid burn-in) there’s decent contrast and colour richness, and it’s comfortable enough on the eyes to watch an entire movie.

We’d have liked a faster refresh rate. At 60Hz the Pixel Tablet can look a tad jittery when scrolling quickly through apps and web pages, especially if you’re comparing it with the 90Hz and 120Hz displays found on the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones.

(Google)

We’d have also liked a bit more customisation in the hub mode, which starts automatically once the tablet is docked. By default, it’s a minimalist photo display with a Google Home button to launch your smart home controls, but a few extra widgets to quickly access your video doorbell would’ve made the tablet more immediately useful when docked.

The lack of face unlock also slows things down. The power button doubles as a fingerprint scanner, so family members can register themselves on the device and access their own profiles and information just by unlocking the tablet with their finger. The guest mode means visitors can easily use the tablet to control things such as lighting, air conditioning and doorbells without you needing to share any sensitive log-in details with them – that’s particularly convenient for anyone who occasionally rents out their home to strangers.

There’s a choice of 128GB or 256GB of storage, and both configurations are powered by 8GB of RAM and Google’s Tensor G2 processor. There’s an optional case with a striking-looking aluminium ring handle – which looks a tiny bit like a toilet-roll holder – and extra docks can be bought to give the tablet more homes around the house.

The verdict: Google Pixel Tablet

The Pixel Tablet is a clever little thing. It straddles the line between a traditional tablet and a smart home device, and solves two of the biggest problems in this product category: what to do with your tablet when you’re not using it, and how to share it with the rest of your household. Rather than gathering dust in a drawer – and having no charge left when you actually decide to grab it – the Pixel Tablet takes advantage of its charging speaker dock to become an integrated part of your home.

It is, however, a pretty average lightweight tablet with a just-about-good-enough display. The Android operating system has seen massive improvements to bring it to the bigger screen, but the tablet experience still has a few rough edges to iron out. The app selection is still miles behind the iPad, too. This is still the most family-friendly tablet we’ve tested but, at launch, it feels a little bit like work in progress.

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