Ooh, the last time I covered a Google made tablet
was 2018 with the Pixel Slate. It was a Chrome OS powered tablet
that had amazing speakers. But the rest of it sucked so hard, it flopped so bad
Google didn't make another tablet for five years.
Fast forward five years and here we are with the new Google Pixel tablet.
It's powered by Android, not Chrome OS, thankfully. And it's got a bit of a different gimmick
to a lot of the other tablets that we see out on the market these days
because in the box is one of these,
which is the charging speaker dock,
which comes with the Pixel tablet by default.
They're really designing this thing, not just as a tablet in the style of like Apple
who's trying to be like, oh, it's a computer. They are being pretty upfront about the fact
that this thing is not going to replace your laptop.
We got a power adapter. Oh, that's not super long.
I am disappointed to see that we're still using barrel chargers for stuff like this.
Like, can we not just do USB-C for everything please? Like, and we also got some documentation.
Let's get started. Press and hold the power button. I need to know that.
On the, oh, here we go. It's the whole debate again. Which one's the top?
The camera's on this side. I think that's the top. I think we can say that it's the top for sure
because will it attach the magnets? Yes. Camera on the top there.
So this is the top. Okay, on this side, we have volume rocker.
Yes, I'm guessing unless I'm tripping and that's not a rocker and just a button.
Power button with an integrated fingerprint reader
if I'm not mistaken. We got two mics, I guess, on the top as well.
We got, okay, two speakers.
And I guess another mic. On this side, we have,
these are like rubberized stompers. We can call them stompers.
And on the other side, we have two more speakers and the USB-C 3.2 Gen 1.
Not bad. Of course, you can charge it via that USB-C port but you can also charge it on the charging dock.
Remember how that's part of the name? On the front is a 10.95 inch display
with a 2560 by 1600 resolution.
That is 276 pixels per inch.
An eight megapixel camera on the front here and another eight megapixel camera on the back,
although it's bigger. This color is porcelain and it comes in two other colors,
Hazel and Rose, because you don't wanna offend anybody with like a bright purple or something, calm down.
The charging dock itself is good weight, good for juggling.
It's got a rubberized bottom like the other nest hubs. I have a nest hub at home, not a nest hub max
because I'm not trying to impress anybody. And it's got this fabric covering over a speaker.
There's a speaker in there and there's also speakers in here, as I said.
One thing that I haven't mentioned is that it does have the Tensor G2,
the same chip that is powering the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro
inside this thing, which means that we should have some pretty good hardware
in there if we wanna do anything intensive. So let's check it out after this message from our spot.
Okay, we got our charging dock plugged in here and you can just pop it on there.
I was gonna say I'm pretty satisfied with how it like finds its way onto the dock,
but I mean, if I'm not looking and I just do this
or you could slide down, ooh, that was very satisfying.
Being the first tablet that Google has made as a first-party device in five years,
it also represents the arrival of Google's new tablet-focused,
tablet-optimized Android experience. It's finally time to have our apps
be a little bit more optimized for larger screens
on our quote-unquote mobile operating systems.
Right away, it was pretty dark when I turned it on, but like turning it all the way up,
it says that it's supposed to be capable of 500 nits.
That's very bright and on the camera view. But according to Labs,
they actually registered it going up to 550 nits,
which is very, very impressive for a tablet that's supposed to remain indoors.
I mean, we have our bright lights here, so I'm gonna, I need it to be a little bit brighter.
What are you gonna use this device for? I mean, it's got the Tensor G2 inside.
Like I said, it's got eight gigs of RAM and either 128 or 256 gigs of storage.
You know, like I said, they have positioned this as sort of a more casual home device
instead of like something that you're going to really use for work.
It's gonna sit here in your kitchen or on your bedstand or whatever. So the speakers and the, you know, display quality
are probably gonna be a bit important, so let's check that out. Let's go to YouTube.
Although it's also got Google TV. This does not quite look like the actual, you know, TV,
although what happens? Does anything happen if I set it on there? No, it just looks like the same.
Okay, so it looks like a bigger version of the Google TV Android app that you would like open on your phone.
I mean, it looks to me like it's been optimized a little bit for a tablet interface
instead of like being a big, big phone. I've heard that the third-party apps, non-Google apps,
don't look as good. Okay, let's open Instagram because that's not a Google app.
Although it's not a app that's optimized for tablet
for a big screen, you can double-tap on one side to kind of bring it to one side
so you can use it like a big phone, I guess, and double-tap to bring it over there again.
So there's that. All right, let's take a look at the screen quality and speaker quality.
That's Max.
I'm gonna pull it back a little bit. That's pretty loud.
That's pretty good.
It's really tinny when you do that, but when you give it a little bit of space,
does not sound good on the table. Like I said in the intro,
the Pixel Slate speakers blew me away.
This is not as good. However, you can get even more power.
I actually don't like it as much on the stand.
So you like bass and mids, eh? Here's some more. And I'm like, not that much.
After my extensive scientific testing process,
I've determined that there's no audio coming out of the tablet speakers when it's on the dock.
Okay, it turns out I imagined that whole thing about it using both the tablet speakers and the dock speakers
when you attach it to the dock. But now I'm really sad
because that could potentially fix the issue
with these speakers that I have. Having the sort of tweeters on the tablet kind of fill that in,
again, maybe would fix that problem. I don't know. I don't make tablets.
I just make fun of them. Overall sound impressions are really good.
I'm impressed with the sound from the tablet itself,
although while I was talking about that, I was thinking about relaxing with just the tablet itself.
And I realized there's no headphone jack. USB-C or Bluetooth earbuds only.
Now, I don't expect that you'll use the rear camera a whole ton with this tablet,
but you very well might use the front-facing camera for Zoom calls, not Zoom calls, Google Meet.
You'll use the video calling app that Google has not killed yet.
Hey, grandma, I'm just trying to make your recipe
that you gave me for chocolate muffins, but I'm out of chocolate.
Is there something I could use instead? Raisins?
Yeah, this is a max volume.
That's not very loud.
And that's max volume on the charging dock.
I don't know whether that's the camera app itself or some other issue, but it seems like the mics
on this thing might be pretty weak. What are you gonna take a selfie photo with?
I mean, it seems to look better.
I'm used to photos onto some devices looking a little bit better than I expect on this set
because we have a professional lighting setup. And when a photo is not as impressive on this setup,
I think you know that there's an issue. Let's see. Ooh, that's pretty rough on the video mode.
Let's take some video. Raise the roof.
Lots of noise, lots of artifacting.
Over here with the more well-lit stuff.
Still. That's not amazing. So it's eight megapixels.
The cameras don't seem that good. Frankly, I think this actually is below the line
of what I would consider acceptable for a Google-made device.
Like it's the Pixel tablet. It's the first-gen tablet. You could argue that that means
that it shouldn't be that good, but it's just regular smartphone cameras, especially for something where you may be,
oh, maybe something's happening in your house. Your kid is doing something cool
and you want to take a photo real quick or whatever and it's right there and you grab it and it's like,
however, it might redeem itself with the performance.
So let's take a look. Labs did testing. So according to the Labs testing,
the Tensor G2 and the Pixel tablet performs
about on par with the Pixel 7 Pro, which has the same processor, dolphin emulator.
We got a little bit more. Genshin is less, actually,
but Call of Duty Mobile and Unhappy Raccoon both pull ahead a little bit over the Pixel 7 Pro,
which is interesting to see. There's more room for activities in there.
In our non-gaming tests, it's a similar situation in 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme
is slight bump, but in app launches, there's actually a bit of a,
what's the opposite of a bump? A dent. A dent across the board.
In our battery tests with data courtesy of the lab,
we've got some pretty impressive results. The Pixel tablet matched the Pixel 7a
and did much better than the Pixel 7 Pro with 21 and a half hours in our longevity test,
which was playing YouTube videos at 720p and 50% brightness.
You're probably gonna wanna play videos at a higher res than that most of the time with tablet.
So just be aware, but still very impressive. The Pixel tablet also lasted 4.15 hours
in our stress test, which was quite impressive compared to the other phones we've tested,
which makes sense since the Pixel tablet has a 7,000 milliamp hour battery,
probably more than most of the phones here. For charging, the Pixel tablet was able to get
to 48% battery in an hour, which isn't too bad,
but then you'll have to wait another hour and 55 minutes to get to the full charge with its 65 watt charger,
which isn't amazing, but you know, it's a tablet, it's got a pretty big battery, pretty good.
When it comes to display testing, Labs found that overall, the display is pretty good.
As I said, it measures at 550 nits,
which is above its rated 500 nits. And for color accuracy,
it hits about a 98% sRGB rating,
which is pretty good, but not HDR level.
For connectivity, it doesn't have the most cutting edge standards.
It's got Wi-Fi 6 instead of 6E or 7,
and it's Bluetooth 5.2. It'll do you fine for what you're doing.
But it is the first tablet made by Google
that supports Chromecast as a receiving device.
So you can cast stuff from another device
to your Pixel tablet. Another thing I want to note is that
because this is using Google's, you know, new optimized tablet-esque form of Android,
that is also on the foldables, we can see the same sort of dock that is now in Android,
like a la iPadOS or MacOS.
We were debating whether that dock is actually useful, but I think one major way that it can be useful
is to use it in a way that you can do on iPadOS,
and you've been able to do for a while. So like if I split screen, and I select another app,
on an Android phone, without the dock, you can't replace one of the apps in the split screen.
Some third-party manufacturers like Samsung or ASUS or whatever, they might have some way to get around this.
I'm not sure. But now it's baked into Android itself that you can bring up this dock,
and I'm gonna say, oh, I want to use, I want to get this one. I want to get rid of Play Store,
and I want it to be Chrome instead. Now you can do that. That's pretty cool. This speaker comes with the tablet,
but you can buy another one for $130.
The argument for wanting one is so that you can have one in one place, and then another dock
in another area of your room, so you can like pick up the tablet,
you know, walk into the next room, glued to your screen, like a doom scroller,
and walk into your other room where there's another charging dock,
and place it down there. $130 for that convenience, though?
That's a hard sell. But the whole package with the charging dock
and the tablet is $499, which I would say, especially in today's economy,
is a little steep for essentially a glorified nest hub.
I mean, you can take it off and use it as tablet, sure, but it's only 11 inches.
You're not gonna be using it for like work as well.
It's pretty much just a play and like home helping tablet.
Although, if this thing's worth $130,
that means the tablet is only 370.
If you're looking for a pretty good tablet at the lower end of the range,
Apple's ninth gen iPad, which I think is the least powerful one
that they sell now is 329, which is even cheaper than 370,
which is a made up price I came up with after taking away the price of the speaker dock.
It's 499, so this thing's $500, which is more expensive than the 10th gen iPad,
which is really kind of the bottom current gen iPad that Apple offers.
So like, it's got the speaker, yes, but I can guarantee you
there's gonna be some jank with this. It's not an iPad.
I feel like I've liked Apple a bit more recently.
Maybe that's not fair. Overall, I think that this is a good direction
for Google to be going with their tablets. I think that they tried the sort of like,
oh, we're doing our own version of an iPad Pro,
but it's not gonna be running Android. It's gonna be running Chrome OS. And the response has been clear every time
that like, if Google's gonna make a tablet, the only one that people are really gonna accept
is like a basic one that's not trying to do anything too crazy.
This, you could argue that this is a little bit crazy, but you could also argue that it makes a whole lot of sense
given that one of their most popular categories of devices,
especially in recent years, has been their Nest Hub home displays.
And now it's basically a better Nest Hub home display
that with the tablet you can take off and play around with. So I like it.
I want them to continue on this.
And I mean, the most important thing is that they just don't kill the product.
And the most important thing for you is that I thank you for watching this whole video.
If you wanna watch more videos, ShortCircuit is a YouTube channel.
They make lots.