There weren’t too many surprises at today’s Made by Google event in Brooklyn, NY. We knew the Pixel 7/7 Pro would make its official debut, with accompanying details about its specifications and camera hardware. And we knew that the Pixel Watch would finally arrive into the zeitgeist. We didn’t realise Google would also use its event to remind us that it’s still making a standalone Pixel Tablet — and that it would look like something out of the Nest lineup.
We knew the tablet was coming, thanks to a brief mention at Google I/O earlier this year. But today’s additional teaser solidified that it will be available with a companion fabric-covered dock that houses a speaker and helps the Pixel Tablet blend in with your Nest devices. The tablet itself will bind to the dock using strong magnets.
Seriously, look at the renders of this thing: it looks exactly like a Nest Hub when it’s docked. However, looking at the inside, it’s an entirely different device than anything from the Nest smart home lineup. For one, it runs the Android operating system rather than Fuschia OS, which is what Google’s been shifting to for many of its smart devices. It also runs the custom Tensor G2 chip powering up the Pixel 7/7 Pro smartphones, meaning the tablet will likely have many of the same AI-enhanced smarts as its smaller counterparts.
Google lauded the construction of the device, which uses different build materials than the PIxel 7/7 Pro. The Pixel Tablet features a “nano-ceramic” coating inspired by the look and feel of a porcelain sculpture. The body is comprised of recycled aluminium, too, which bodes well for the company’s claims of sustainability (though it’s not doing much to turn back the clock on climate change).
We’ll know more about the Pixel Tablet when it launches next year. For now, Google will keep throwing us bones about this slate device, like that it can operate your smart home to a degree. But we still need more details before we can tell if this tablet will be the second coming of the Nexus 7 or an alternative to the Nest Hub.