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As expected, Google took to the stage today at I/O and talked a lot about AI but that wasn’t all they talked about. We knew that there was hardware coming and while there weren’t really any surprises, I was relieved to see that the long-awaited Pixel Tablet was going to ship with the docking station/smart speaker. Early leaks showed the Pixel Tablet dock priced at $129 which had me worried that the all-in-one speaker stand would be sold separately which could bring the price of the Pixel Tablet well over $600 of you bought the slate and the speaker.
Thankfully, that is not the case. Now that the Pixel Tablet is official, you can pre-order Google’s new Android tablet for $499 and the charging speaker dock is included. The Pixel Tablet is also the first Android tablet to market that supports the USI stylus protocol that has become the standard on Chromebooks. The pen isn’t included but you can find some great options like the Penoval USI 2.0 pen readily available on Amazon. And yes, the Pixel Tablet does support USI 2.0.
The Pixel Tablet is powered by the same Tensor 2 SoC that’s found in the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro smartphones as well as the recently announced Pixel 7a that’s up for order right now. Matched with 8GB of RAM, this tablet should handle itself quite well which is great because there are enough mediocre tablets out there and we don’t need another one.
The Pixel Tablet comes in three colors, Porcelain, Hazel and Rose and you can choose from either 128GB or 256GB of storage. The latter will bump the price up to $599 which isn’t horrible but hopefully, we’ll see some sales on the tablet sooner than later. The tablet is equipped with Bluetooth 5.2 and simultaneous dual-band Wi-Fi 6 which should result in smooth, seamless connectivity when surfing, streaming or casting. You can pre-order the Pixel Tablet from Best Buy or the Google Store today and devices start shipping around June 20th.
