Google is launching, for the first time in many years, a new Android tablet. He confirmed this during his Google IO 2022 conference, after presenting the Pixel 6a, Pixel 7, Pixel Watch and Android 13.
There’s a catch here though: it’s not coming anytime soon. Google has confirmed that it will arrive at some point in 2023, although we hope to see more by then.
Not much about the tablet has been shown other than the image you can see above (as well as a few other glimpses of it). To our new eyes, it looks a lot like a Google Home Hub that someone removed from its mount, but with slightly different software.
The bezels around the screen are quite large, leading some on the TechRadar team (including this reviewer) to think this might be a mid-range tablet, instead of a premium tablet.
We’ve heard it will also use Google’s own Tensor chipset, although if it arrives in 2023 it could actually be the second or even third generation version of that processor.
At Google IO, the company also showed off its tablet-oriented version on Android 13, so we can expect that software to appear on that tablet as well – so now’s the perfect time for Google to release its new slate.
Google described it as an exciting time for tablets, hence the big software update and now its own hardware, and we hope to hear more about the Google Pixel tablet before it launches.
If we’re allowed to speculate briefly: Google hasn’t sounded 100% solid about the tablet, so we imagine it doesn’t have a set release window yet. Since the company is teasing it so soon, we’ll almost certainly hear more about it during Google IO 2023.