Why Is Google Bringing Android Tablets Back With the Pixel Tablet?

pcmag.com:

Phones are boring, so Google is bringing Android tablets back. One of the more surprising announcements at Google I/O yesterday was the company recommitting to Android tablet software, with the production of a Pixel Tablet coming in 2023.

As recently as 2019, though, Google said it would no longer make Android tablets, and the company's Android tablet software has been pretty weak for a long time. While Apple's iPads and Microsoft Windows tablets tend to have software designed for bigger screens, Android apps running on tablets tend to just look like stretched-out phone interfaces, with a lot of white space and not a lot of thought put into how to use the tablet's real estate to best purpose.

Yes, an Android tablet market exists. Globally, Samsung, Lenovo, Honor, and Amazon sell about as many tablets together as Apple does iPads, according to IDC(Opens in a new window). But it's a slow-growing and by and large mature market.

So what's really new here? Google hinted at the change during I/O. It's about foldable phones, and a little about 5G.

"Foldables are delivering all the benefits of a large-screen device with the portability of a phone...this year we've been working hard to make Android tablets amazing," Google VP of Engineering Trystan Upstill said at I/O.

Years ago, we threw the word "phablet" around for big phones, saying they had tablet-like screens. Yesterday's phablets are today's mainstream phones. It turns out they didn't need a real interface rethink, as long as they stayed basically one-handed devices.

But foldable phones unfold to 7, 8, or even 9-inch screens. They're effectively as big, or bigger, than Google's most famous and most successful tablet, 2013's Nexus 7. So they demand a new interface approach.