I don’t have any “smart” stuff in my home (other than phones). I suspect I’d feel differently about this thing if I did.
I’ve been slowly removing Alexa from my life, but it seems very tough for me to nix our Echo Show in the Kitchen. It’s been useful.
I went the HomeKit route instead of Google, so a HomePod with a screen is what I wish for (though I know it won’t ever come). That being said, this does look pretty slick.
I have a home hub (got it on sale a while back) and I agree that it feels like it should be a small detachable tablet. This looks like the natural next evolution.
I’ve had a few android tablets. They’ve all been lackluster and unimpressive. This one, at least seems like it would serve a general purpose (home hub) with the added benefit of being able to detach it and use it as a tablet when needed.
i have the hub max and rarely use it as anything but do like the ability to do so. i hate how quiet mine is, i dont know if its because of where its placed but a mini sounded louder in about the same spot. my mom got a fire tablet that she hates because she cant get the play store on, and she doesnt want me to root it. so this seems like a good natural fix for both things to me. it would give her a nice tablet that actually works and she might actually use home automation stuff.
edit: just watched the mkbhd video about it and it seems to have the same problem. i dont get it the minis sound great and are loud, well for what they are anyway. like i have my mini in the bathroom down the hall with the door closed and i can hear the mini better than my hub max thats 20ft away with out much between it and me when home automation announcements happen.
still might get this for my mom however so shell have a nice decent tablet that isnt apple though because the fire tab aint working for her.
I’ve bought Pixel Phones for a while now. I’m no fan of Google. but I appreciate a no BS phone, that gets actual updates. My son has long had Fire Tables (being cheap and all that), but I don’t like the Amazon version of Android. I’m looking forward to seeing how this new tablet fares.
We use a bunch of different Nest Speakers within a house. I wonder if this would be useful to getting these connected? The home app works well now but casting from different music apps can have issues.
I was in the market for a tablet during the pandemic and was very frustrated with the options. I needed something we could use on an exercise bike and switch between users easily. We were looking at one of the Galaxy models that was $900 and I think we decided it just wasn’t worth it for a glorified tv that doesn’t do half the things we wanted. So this is $400 cheaper and does literally everything we want it to. I also don’t have smart devices, but I’m stoked just to have an android tablet that isn’t overly complicated.
I dont know how I feel about giving google access to cameras, speakers, and other features around my house given their track record with collecting data so the main docking feature is a little lost on me.
That aside I think the pixel tablet will do about as well(or poorly depending on perspective) as the other higher end android tablets do.
I think the issue that tablets run into is that there isnt really a lot of room for them. For ultra portable media consumption phones do the job pretty well these days, for higher end productivity consumption you start competing with other devices like laptops.
The niche left behind for tablets is not very big and already saturated. You have the super cheap media consumption device end of things, and Amazon dominates that market. For something to just read off of or watch videos on they absolutely do the trick and can do it for under $200. The premium tablet space is dominated by apple and the ipad. It just genuinely is more powerful and has a better ecosystem of tablet form factor apps.
Yeah, I’d like it, but be damned if Google was staying on it.
I’d hope there was a tablet rom from Graphene, Calyx, or Lineage I could flash it with.
Yea an unlockable bootloader is the only way I’d consider this. It’d be cool to see something like GNU/Linux put on this as well.
