Google is planning a return to the Android tablet market. At Google I/O earlier this month, the company announced that it's developing a new Android-powered slate dubbed the Pixel Tablet for 2023. Now, that same Pixel Tablet has shown up in the database of a regulatory agency that concerns styluses.
An unannounced Google tablet codenamed “Tangor” was spotted online at USI (Universal Stylus Initiative) via NuGiz. The certificate suggests that the Google tablet in question offers support for styluses that conform to the USI device specifications.
In other words, whether or not the Pixel Tablet will ship with a stylus isn't entirely clear, but it does look like Google will at least add third-party stylus support to its upcoming tablet.
USI defines industry-wide standards for interoperable communication between styluses and mobile devices (check the video below for details). The organization's board of directors includes executives from Google, Lenovo, Synaptics, Intel, and others.
Is “Tangor” the upcoming Google Pixel Tablet? Is the Tango AR project making a comeback?
There's no direct connection between the “Tangor” codename revealed by USI and the Google Pixel Tablet moniker. However, unless Google is working on more than one Android tablet for 2023, which is unlikely, then yes, Tangor should be the Pixel Tablet by default.
If the codename sounds familiar, it's probably because of Google Tango. The latter was an augmented reality computing platform that Google had demonstrated on a couple of limited-run devices known as the Peanut phone and the Yellowstone tablet. The latter was widely known as the Google Project Tango tablet.
Whether or not the upcoming Google Pixel Tablet for 2023 has anything to do with the Tango augmented reality platform, given the “Tangor” codename, is unclear.
Google revealed the so-called Tango tablet in 2014, but no new Tango-based devices (from Google or partner OEMs) have gotten announced since 2017. The project sort of fell into obscurity, at least as far as the public is concerned.
But regardless of the Google Pixel Tablet's codename, the slate will enter a market space dominated by Samsung tablets. With that in mind, it would make a certain amount of sense for it to adopt stylus capabilities, given that most Samsung tablets come with an S Pen.
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