Google Pixel Tablet Review

It has been a minute since Google’s Nexus project brought the Nexus 7 tablet to the world, but here in 2023, Google is giving tablets another shot with its own Pixel tablet. This $500 device marks Google’s first real entry into the tablet market as a manufacturer (rather than having an OEM make the device for it). With Google’s in-house Tensor chip and special speaker stand, Google is looking to set a different pace for its Android tablet.

Google’s tablet tries to leverage simplicity to deliver beauty. The rear is a matte-finished, ceramic-coated aluminum and the front is a glass panel with large white bezels. In effect, it looks much like the recent iPad, from its loosely curving corners to its uniform bezels. Even its camera placement is similar. Two rubber bumpers on the bottom edge help keep the tablet from sliding around if you prop it up against something.

So far, there’s little to make the Pixel Tablet stand out, though. Even the premium-seeming bill of materials has its downsides: the nano-ceramic coating on the back of the devices loves to scrape along things and is therefore terribly prone to unsightly blemishes, even if it's not getting damaged itself.

The bezels aren’t doing the Pixel Tablet any favors either at just about a half inch. Samsung’s now-dated Galaxy Tab S7 line had it beat for bezel thickness, and that’s without getting into the screen differences.

The Pixel Tablet has a roughly 11-inch display with a 2560 x 1,600 resolution. It can go up to 500 nits, which is reasonably bright. But it’s a basic IPS display, and it’s no looker. Glare further impacts the image, and it isn’t helped by backlight bleed, which only gets worse with off-angle viewing.

Dark scenes in Prey were hard to make out, leaving a lot of detail on the table. It gets some credit for sharpness, but doesn’t outpace Samsung’s top-line tablets. It doesn’t get a smoothness edge either with a basic 60Hz refresh rate. Stylus support is nice to see, but that’s again only keeping up with Samsung and Apple, not meaningfully rivaling them. And that’s at best. Samsung and Apple have powerful integration of their styluses while the Pixel Tablet just supports USI 2.0 styluses, not necessarily guaranteeing palm rejection, advanced pressure or angle sensitivity, or low latency – a crucial aspect of stylus utility.

The Tablet has decent audio capabilities thanks to a set of four speakers (again, keeping up with Samsung, not surpassing). The audio coming out is generally good at medium volume, but can become an ear-sore at max volume. It’s also not enough volume for a large room when maxed out. I find my hands constantly covering two of the speakers when I’m holding the tablet, immediately nerfing their value much of the time.

Here’s where the tablet is meant to set itself apart: it has a dock with a speaker built in. The Pixel Tablet magnetically attaches to the dock and links to it with pogo pins, providing 15-watt power and data transfer to the dock’s speaker. While the magnet provides a firm hold, it doesn’t always link up the tablet and pogo pins perfectly, so it can take some fussing. That firm hold also isn’t firm enough to keep the tablet attached when pressing the power button (which also doubles as a fingerprint scanner) – a reality I found out at the near-peril of the tablet, which held up surprisingly well against a four-foot drop, though not entirely unscathed. Topping it off, the stand lets the tablet tip forward quite easily. In other words, this isn’t a setup that should be placed at the edge of anything.

Now, with the tablet's four speakers and the dock’s speaker, we should be in business, right? Rather disappointingly, docking the tablet shifts all the audio output to the dock speaker rather than combining the tablet’s and dock’s speakers together. The dock speaker is certainly louder and capable of more low-end, but it doesn’t offer remarkable audio. At max volume, it’s a bit grating, suffers from some audio ducking, doesn’t handle busy audio mixes well, and only puts out mono audio. For comparison, Amazon’s new, cheapest speaker, the Echo Pop, has a bigger speaker driver and better sound (though barely), retails for $40 (is regularly discounted), and doesn’t require a docked tablet to function. And let’s not forget that Google has its own 10-inch Nest Hub Max with even beefier speakers for less than half the price of this tablet.

The tablet can double as a Chromecast, letting you cast to it. But I’m scratching my head over the utility in that. The screen isn’t big enough to want to watch from beyond arm’s length, so why bother to control it with a separate device? And supposing you want to use Chromecast to call up music or podcasts, you could just instead use your voice with Google Assistant and leverage the tablet's three mics for easy, hands-free control. Google also has a Ultra-Wideband radio in the tablet, but isn’t currently doing anything meaningful with it, like precise location tracking a la Apple AirTags.

At least the Pixel Tablet has Wi-Fi 6, giving it a fast and stable wireless connection. But again, this is nothing special in 2023.

Some of Google’s magic lies in its software. But I don’t find too much magic on deck here that’s not more or less available elsewhere. The device comes running Android 13 with little customization to take it away from vanilla. But where other Pixel devices might get the promise of several years of OS updates, Google is only promising five years of security updates for this device, which may or may not include actual OS updates.

The Pixel Tablet gets Google’s enhanced voice recognition, which can be handy if you want to fire off a message with just your voice or take voice notes. But that’s available on every Pixel phone from the Pixel 6 and up – and though Google’s voice recognition is the best I’ve come across, plenty of other devices have reasonably accurate voice-to-text capabilities as well.

As happy as I am with the Android ecosystem, the thought of using the many default apps that voice control is limited to isn’t winning the Pixel Tablet any favors. As a Google Voice user for mobile service, I can’t ask Google Assistant to send a text. My FLAC music library and music player also never get called up when I ask Google Assistant to play some music. The best I can do is open the app with my voice, and then tap around to get what I actually want. Instead, I get YouTube Music as a default music service, which is great if you want to have Dexter Gordon’s jazz classic Blue Bossa followed up by an advertisement.

Packing the same Tensor G2 chipset that powers the Pixel 7 line, the Pixel Tablet has predictably smooth performance in everyday use. It browses the web, loads up streaming video, and responds to voice commands rather snappily.

However, gaming isn’t holding up well. It can run games, but where you could trade off visual quality for smoother gameplay on the phones, the swing is more severe on the tablet. Genshin Impact doesn’t want to run smoothly at max settings on the Pixel Tablet, and it chugs fairly often. Normally, dialing back the settings a little would be all it takes, and sure enough switching to High settings improves performance. But on the 11-inch screen, the lowered resolution is fairly unsightly, and no degree of sharpness from a display will make up for a low rendering resolution.

The 8GB of RAM feels frequently purged as well. Switching between apps, I notice the Pixel Tablet often reloading content rather than simply resuming right where I’d left off.

At least the tablet doesn’t suffer from heat in quite the same way Google’s phones do. There’s a lot more surface area to dissipate heat on the tablet, so even after running Genshin Impact for a half hour with screen brightness maxed, the tablet didn’t have any major hot spots.

It runs for the long haul as well. Without any 5G radios to deal with or the dwindling efficiency that comes from running too hot, the Pixel Tablet makes for a useful entertainment device, since it can run for hours away from the charger while just sipping on its battery. Watching downloaded episodes of Fargo on a four-hour bus ride, the battery budged less than 10%. When I got where I was headed, there was plenty of juice to watch a few more episodes before the day was done. Were the episodes as enjoyable as they might have been on a better display? No. But at least I wasn’t worried about running out of battery and having no display to watch on.

The Pixel Tablet has an interesting camera setup. There is just one camera on each side, but the cameras have identical specifications. Here’s what they offer:

Despite being cameras on a Pixel device, these are not the Pixel cameras you might have come to expect.

There’s a lot of back-end processing to make the photos look even somewhat OK, as before hitting that shutter, the compositions appear a touch washed out. They are also particularly close-up feeling after coming from the much wider main cameras you’ll find on most smartphones. Ultimately, this isn’t a device you want for any sort of photography. As if shooting with a tablet wasn’t unwieldy enough, the image quality is just not on the Pixel level

If you’re a Portrait Mode fan, you’ll miss out here as well. Despite using the same sensors on both sides, the Pixel Tablet only supports Portrait Mode from the front-facing camera. That’s odd enough, but the fact Portrait mode is an effect applied after the face just makes it even odder. Video is also an afterthought, with the Pixel Tablet supporting a meager 1080p/30FPS limit.

The Google Pixel Tablet is available from Google for $499 with 128GB of storage or $599 with 256GB of storage. It comes in three colors, and includes the charging dock. The charging dock is also available as a separate $129 purchase if you want more than one.

The Pixel Tablet may wow compared to the budget options from Amazon, but the only leg it has to stand on against Apple’s iPads and even some of Samsung’s older Galaxy Tab S models is the voice-recognition enabled by its Tensor G2 chip. Its special stand has some value, but not the $129 value Google ascribed to it. It’s fine that Google didn’t try to make a super tablet that does everything – Samsung has that covered. There’s room for an Android tablet that’s just good. But that room is at a lower price point than Google positioned the Pixel Tablet, where Samsung’s still-great tablets from prior years aren’t still swarming and offering all-around better packages.