Right at the end of the Android portion of the Google I/O keynote we got a true "one more thing" style moment with the tease of some new hardware. The Pixel Tablet is Google's next attempt at a tablet, and aside from the fact it uses the company's first-party Tensor chip, we know basically nothing.

Well, except that it's not coming until 2023. We did get to see some renders, albeit briefly, and it's fair to say this is no iPad Pro.

It almost looks a bit like a Nest Hub from the front...

In an interview with The Verge, Google's Rick Osterloh has discussed just why Google is getting back into tablets. In short, it's to show the world that the company does actually care about Android tablets. The pandemic has made it clear that tablets still have a unique position as consumption devices, be that games, media, or the web. And Google wants to provide a companion for the Pixel phones but with a larger display.

It's fair to be dubious about just how committed Google is to tablets, though. We've been here before many times. Honeycomb was it. Then the Nexus 7 was it. The Nexus 10, Nexus 9, Pixel C, Google has thrown its weight behind tablets enough times before and in 2022 we're still in a world where the iPad is just dominant.

The software has always been the real issue, but Google has been putting more into that of late, first with Android 12L and then with Android 13. Google also announced at I/O some of what we can expect for tablets, starting with 20 first-party apps that will finally be good to use on a larger display.  Third-party apps such as TikTok, Facebook, Zoom, and Canva are also set to receive tablet-focused updates, while Google says it’s also working on making it easier to discover optimized tablet apps on the Google Play Store.

So, what do we think, then?