The Google Pixel Tablet is an interesting device. As we said in our Google Pixel Tablet review, it's half tablet, half home hub – but at its original (and current) official price it was a bit of a hard sell. That perhaps explains why Google is now reportedly planning a soft relaunch of the device with a lower price.
According to @mysterylupin on X, Google is planning to relaunch the tablet without its Charging Speaker Dock. That's sold separately for £139.
The Pixel Tablet currently retails for £599 via Google, although you can get it for a lot less if you shop around: a quick search this morning turned up some retailers such as Amazon doing the tablet for £479. And that's with the dock included, so there's clearly plenty of scope for an official price cut here.
How much will the relaunched Pixel Tablet cost?
That's a good question, and it partly depends on whether Google will sell the tablet without any kind of charger: the dock currently takes care of charging. If Google drops the dock it might also decide to sell the Tablet with a USB-C cable as a bring your own charger option, although of course that would add to the purchase price for end users who don't happen to have a spare 30W charger kicking about.
If Google only drops the recommended retail price by £130ish, it's probably still going to be too pricey: that would bring the tablet down to around £460, but Apple's cheapest iPad is around £90 less than that. A sub-£400 price tag for Google's tablet would make it a much more appealing rival.
It's possible that the relaunch could also herald the arrival of the fourth Pixel Tablet colour option: the tablet was originally reported to launch with a black colour option, but that's currently missing in action.
It seems like Google's tablet teams have been busy. According to 9to5Google there's also a rumoured new Nest Hub Max in development, although as yet there's no confirmation of that particular rumour. However, a dock-free Pixel Tablet would be less home hub-y, which would help differentiate it from any new smart display. We may discover more at next month's Google I/O event.
