A terrible Pixel Tablet

1. blog

In a strange twist of history, Google finally woke and thought "I know what we need to do! We need to make a TABLET!".

So some time soon in 2023, Google will release "The tablet that only Google could make", the Pixel Tablet.

Having owned a Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e for a few years, I was very curious to see how this would pan out and especially whether it would be easier to flash than the Samsung. As an aside, I figured I would give that a shot, and within a few days managed to completely brick the device. Awesome. See gts4lvwifi for the painful details of that.

In any case, Google made a tablet. I own a Pixel phone and I'm moderately happy with it. It's easy to flash with CalyxOS, maybe this is the promise land of tablets?

Compared with the Samsung

But it turns out that the Pixel Tablet pales in comparison with the Samsung tablet, produced 4 years ago, in 2019:

• it's thicker (8.1mm vs 5.5mm)
• it's heavier (493g vs 400g)
• it's not AMOLED (IPS LCD)
• it doesn't have an SD card reader
• its camera is worse (8MP vs 13MP, 1080p video instead of 4k)
• it's more expensive (670EUR vs 410EUR)

What the Pixel tablet has going for it:

• a slightly more powerful CPU
• a stylus
• more storage (128GB or 256GB vs 64GB or 128GB)
• more RAM (8GB vs 4GB or 6GB)
• Wifi 6

I guess I should probably wait for the actual device to come out to see reviews and how it stacks up, but so far it's kind of impressive how underwhelming this is.

Also note that we're comparing against a very old Samsung tablet here, a fairer comparison might be against the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8. There the sizes are comparable, and the Samsung is more expensive than the Pixel, but then the Pixel has absolutely zero advantages and all the other disadvantages.

The Dock

The "Dock" is also worth a little aside.

See, the tablet comes with a dock that doubles as a speaker.

You can't buy the tablet without the dock. You have to have a dock.

I shit you not, actual quote: "Can I purchase a Pixel Tablet without the Charging Speaker Dock? No, you can only purchase the Pixel Tablet with the Charging Speaker Dock."

In case you really, really like the dock, "You may purchase additional Charging Speaker Docks separately (coming soon)." And no, they can't all play together, only the dock the tablet is docked into will play audio.

The dock is not a Bluetooth speaker, it can only play audio from that one tablet that Google made, this one time.

It's also not a battery pack. It's just a charger with speakers in it.

Promising e-waste.

Again, I hope I'm wrong and that this is going to be a fine tablet. But so far, it looks like it doesn't even come close to whatever Samsung threw over the fence before the apocalypse (remember 2019? were we even born yet?).

"The tablet that only Google could make." Amazing. Hopefully no one else gets any bright ideas like this.