The Pixel Slate made a keyboard and trackpad one of its big included features. I miss some of the ideas Google was going for on its previous Slate tablet, which was more of a Chromebook with Android benefits. I miss Google's work focus on the Slate, though I could easily see the Pixel Tablet being a casual grab-a-tablet option in a living room where someone could just pick it up as needed and check a few things, watch a video or play a game. This underlines the family-sharing concept that's at this tablet's core, and I like it. Much like a Chromebook, you can add extra accounts and switch over to others easily enough here, even entering a guest mode or a kid mode. One other advantage of Google tablets over iPads is account-swapping. James Martin/CNET Google makes extra accounts pretty easy But, a subject-tracking, autoframing feature didn't seem to work on my review unit, and video quality looked better for the moment with Google Meet than in Zoom. It means this tablet can be used easily for video chat when docked. Google placed its camera on the long edge where it should be, much like Apple's most recent 10th-gen iPad. The front-facing 8-megapixel camera looked good for selfies and video chat, and looked sharper than my normal laptop-video-chat expectations. Some two-finger swipes and pinches, for instance, were not always recognized, but maybe a future software update can address that. I also found that a few multifinger swipe gestures got a little weird at times in apps like Google Earth. Google's on-screen keyboard is fine, but I didn't fall in love with it. Dictation also works really well: I could see myself voice-typing a lot with the Pixel Tablet, even if I still miss a dedicated keyboard case (hint, hint). The Tensor G2 pulls off some tricks Google has on its Pixel phones, too, notably Magic Eraser in the Photos app, which removes people or objects from shots. There are also some Google Play apps that don't run at all yet on the Pixel Tablet, including Geekbench, which we use for testing tablets for performance comparisons. Google focused on optimizing a bunch of popular apps and also its own core apps first, but hopefully more will come. It feels great to work in these modes, although not all apps work for the Pixel Tablet yet. Videos from another app, like YouTube, can pop up and hover in a small window over these split windows, too. Google's also added a series of widgets that help customize information, which I sometimes found useful and at other times thought weren't flexible enough. Google's renewed attention to tablet software shows, with multitasking that feels like Apple's iPadOS apps can be easily dragged up from an app taskbar into another window, and two apps at once can be adjusted to fit on a few preset-size settings.
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