Since the brief teaser at Google I/O, nothing official has been said about the Pixel Tablet, which is still due at some point in 2023. Now 91mobiles has a few details gleaned from the device as it reportedly enters its engineering phase.
The insights come from developer Kuba Wojciechowski, who has already spilled plenty of Pixel Tablet secrets, most of which pointed to it being a device targeting the budget end of the market (albeit with a possible Pro configuration also in the works).
The latest details may push the Pixel Tablet from budget to mid-range. First of all it will apparently come with either 128GB or 256GB of internal storage, which certainly sounds like a lot compared to the Amazon Fire Tablet which can still be bought with as little as 16GB on the 7-inch version.
You have to remember that Google has never included expandable storage in its Pixel phones, and that’s likely to be the case with the Pixel Tablet too: what you buy is what you’re stuck with forever. Even so, that’s right up there with some of the best iPads in terms of capacity.
Secondly, the Pixel Tablet will apparently be bigger than you might expect with a reported 10.95-inch display. This makes a lot of sense when you consider it’s apparently set to moonlight as a Nest Hub when not in use. In short, a larger screen is easier to see across the room when docked, which certainly helps.
Two other minor points stand out from the report. Firstly, it will support WiFi 6, which is just as well as previous reports have indicated there will be no cellular or GPS sensors for tracking beyond your home’s WiFi. And secondly, Google apparently appears to be readying up its own USI 2.0 (Universal Stylus Support) stylus for the device, as well as supporting third-party styluses. If it’s not called the Pixel Pen, Google is missing an alliterative trick.
Previously, Wojciechowski has revealed that the tablet will use last year’s Tensor chipset paired with just 4GB RAM. That means that in terms of specs, it should offer slightly weaker performance than the $449 Pixel 6a, which has the same processor but 2GB more memory.
With Google’s pure version of Android 13, unencumbered with bloat and custom UIs, a more modest specs sheet could still run it well. And with plenty of storage and a big screen, the Pixel Tablet could carve itself a useful niche in the mid-range non-iOS tablet market.
While the upcoming Made by Google event on October 6 is supposedly about the Pixel 7, Pixel Watch and new Nest devices, we’ll hopefully hear a few more details about the Pixel Tablet then too. Even if it’s just to find out exactly when in 2023 we’ll have one in our hands.
