Just posting the Verge’s review for now, but feel free to throw others in.
Gotta say, it is dumb as hell that the speaker can’t be a speaker on its own. So if I’m listening to music, I can’t pick up the tablet and move over to the couch without severing the audio connection. That is bananas. I’m sure it’s a cost thing, given it’d need a chip of its own, but ffs.
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Their cost benefit analysis seems short-sighted. Having a chip wouldn’t be too expensive as even a Nest Mini has it. Just increase the price by $25 but provide that functionality imo.
Absolutely.
I really want this tablet to be successful, I’m an Apple user personally and I feel like Apple has just gotten lazy with the iPad because there’s no serious competition. Would love to see Google become a serious tablet contender.
They probably didn’t want to spend more R&D time on making the speaker really useful, I guess. Could’ve been a real killer app.
Not sure about the tablet otherwise, I’ve been really happy with my S6 Lite, and it’s cheaper too. There’s an update with the faster Snapdragon 720G and I’d imagine it’s good enough for many users.
I think the dock isn’t also a standalone speaker because of not just cost, but also logistics. I think it’s a lot more complicated to deal with what’s doing what when you need to deal with the tablet being docked or not because when it’s docked, they basically need to act like a single device (like a TV), but when it’s not they need to do their own thing independently.
I think if I wanted to use them independently, I’d just have a charging dock for the tablet, and a speaker. And then I wouldn’t have to try to figure out what it should do in each configuration.
But I also think I must not quite be the target market for this, because it hasn’t interested me much at all. I already have tablets, laptops, speakers, and even a Nest display in the kitchen that I got for free and basically don’t use except as a speaker. I can’t really see this improving my life.
I thought you could alredy do that.
Got mine today and I like it. It’s good. That’s about it. Just good. Nothing all that impressive or exciting about it.
Haha, well, that’s often the best we can hope for with Google.
The best things about it are the multitasking and the ease of charging it on the dock. Making it turn into a smart screen was a great idea.
Received mine today so that I can finally retire my old Surface 3. Not really impressed by the dock… I mean, it works fine and sound is fine. Battery duration seems good and I hope it will stay like that. I don’t see myself using it attached to the dock a lot.
