Google Showcases Pixel Tablet Dock – It Works Like a Smart Display

Google unveiled the Pixel 7 and Pixel Watch at today’s show, but Google really wants their Pixel Tablet to be ready to go too. The company has spoken at length about its upcoming tablet, which won’t be released until 2023. The big news is the opening of a docking station that this thing will stand on, which will turn it into something like a Google Smart Display.

There are pogo pins on the back of the Pixel Tablet, and the other half of that connection is a “speaker charging dock.”Slip your tablet into the magnetic dock, align everything with the spring pins, and you now have a smart display with a more powerful speaker. Aside from the larger scale, it looks almost indistinguishable from the Nest Hub when everything is plugged in, providing some cohesiveness to the hardware lineup.

However, it doesn’t look like much is going on with the software side. The rumor mill is rightfully calling this device a “smart display”and we know that Android 13 includes a “hub mode”that seems to be tailor-made for the Pixel tablet to translate it into an interface you can see from across the room.. . Everything Google showed today while the tablet was in docking mode looked like a normal Android phone/tablet interface.

While the hardware looks exactly like the Nest Hub smart display, the software is nothing like what you see on the Nest Hub. This is surprising considering that Nest Hub’s interface – the Flutter app – can run just fine on Android without any major changes. In fact, the first Google smart displays ran Android. I’m not saying the Nest Hub’s interface is the way to go, but I expected more from a “10-foot”dock-mode interface – something that can be seen from across the room. One software addition made for smart displays is the “screen saver”standby mode, which can display a Google Photos slideshow or a clock.

Google also said that the body of the tablet is made of aluminum, but with a “nano-ceramic coating inspired by the fine texture of porcelain.”Presumably this will give the tablet a “soft, matte and textured look”. Naturally, it comes with the same Tensor G2 SoC as the Pixel 7.

Google would only say that the tablet will arrive in 2023.