Google Pixel Tablet might soon be available at a bargain price, if you don't need the charging dock

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.