The Goole Pixel Tablet is indeed an interesting device, with its ability to double up as a Nest Hub. But this approach has also become a reason for its identity problems, making it only a decent tablet and an average smart home hub. While the included dock has its own shortcomings, like being completely useless on its own, it turns out that it loses its core utility when you have a USB device connected to the tablet.
The dock is a nifty little accessory that lets you convert your Pixel Tablet into a smart home screen with a simple magnetic attachment. You can get a bunch of them and place them all over your house to mount the tablet in whichever room you’re in. Besides charging the tablet, the dock’s purpose is to provide room-filling audio with a larger speaker system. But the dock’s speakers go kaput if you’re using the tablet’s USB-C port.
One Mastodon user discovered that the Pixel Tablet’s dock speakers won’t work when you have something connected to the USB port, as spotted by Mishaal Rahman. Just as the tablet detects the dock, it will display a notification saying that you must remove whatever accessory is connected to the USB port to use the dock speakers (shown in the screenshot above).
Rahman suspects that the Pixel Tablet is perhaps treating the connection to the dock via those pogo pins at the back as a USB connection. And the tablet may not be able to handle both audio and data transfer simultaneously through its USB system, thereby causing this peculiar problem for the users. Whether this is a hardware issue with the onboard USB controller or a software problem that Google could fix isn’t known yet.
But for end users, this means that you won’t be able to use the dock’s speakers when a USB cable is connected to the Pixel Tablet. While you don’t need to charge the tablet over USB when it’s connected to the dock, it could be a major annoyance for people who want to connect a USB hub or other accessories when the tablet is docked. It also means you can’t send ADB commands via USB debugging while docked, as one Googler pointed out in the Mastodon thread.
If you don’t have your heart set on the Pixel Tablet, you can go for any of the best Android tablets for an even better productivity experience with options like the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+.
