The 3 Best Android Tablets 2025

Top pick

The $500 Google Pixel Tablet is a great 11-inch tablet with a long-lasting battery and Google’s latest processor, which allows it to capably handle gaming, streaming media, and light work tasks. One of the Pixel Tablet’s major selling points is an included charging speaker dock that turns the device into a capable little speaker and also lets you control your smart home. (You can buy a $400 version of the tablet without the speaker dock, but we recommend the bundle.) The Pixel Tablet comes preloaded with Android 14 (the latest version) and will get Android 15 when that OS update rolls out this fall. It’s the best-performing Android tablet in day-to-day use that we’ve tested, and it’s available at a great price—especially when you factor in the dock.

It has a beautiful display. The Pixel Tablet boasts a stunning 11-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 2560×1600. The Pixel Tablet’s display produces vivid and punchy colors, and it offers excellent viewing angles. However, in portrait orientation the Pixel Tablet’s semi-widescreen (16:10 ratio) design makes it feel somewhat long and narrow, unlike the more square, 4:3 ratio found on Apple’s tablets. As a result, the Pixel Tablet is best used in landscape mode. (If you’ve never used an iPad, this might not bother you.)

The included dock turns it into an excellent smart-home device. The Pixel Tablet’s dock enables its standout feature, Hub Mode, which transforms it into a smart-home hub. You can use Google Assistant to control smart-home devices such as smart lights, video doorbells, security cameras, and thermostats with the updated Google Home app. You can buy a tablet without the dock for $100 less, and you can buy the dock on its own for $129, but the $500 bundle of both tablet and dock is worth the price.

The dock, which has a fabric shell made of 90% recycled plastic, nearly seamlessly picks up audio from the Pixel Tablet—a song playing on the tablet transfers to the dock’s speaker with only a split-second delay. Though the Pixel Tablet’s four built-in stereo speakers get pretty loud, they can sound tinny at maximum volume. The dock adds a 43.5 mm full-range speaker that is louder than the tablet gets on its own and adds depth and extra bass to audio when the Pixel Tablet is docked. With the dock, the Pixel Tablet can easily fill up a medium-size room with music that sounds pretty good.

It’s lightweight and easy to hold. Weighing just over a pound, the Pixel Tablet is easy to use for extended periods without any discomfort. Google claims that the outer shell is built with over 30% recycled materials, while the internal frame is 100% recycled aluminum. It also has a nano-ceramic coating, which helps to keep it clean and reduces fingerprints, and its power button doubles as a fingerprint sensor.

The Pixel Tablet can easily handle multiple tasks and high-end gaming. It’s powered by Google’s custom Tensor G2 processor, which is also the chip found in our past budget Android pick, the Pixel 7a. This powerful processor allows the tablet to handle multiple tasks with ease. The Pixel Tablet has 8 GB of RAM, and in our testing, it played high-end games like Asphalt 9, Call of Duty: Mobile, Diablo Immortal, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge smoothly, even if the tablet got fairly warm during more intense gameplay.

It supports multitasking, multiple profiles, and other Android 14 features. The Pixel Tablet comes with Android 14 preinstalled, bringing features such as hands-free Google Assistant, live translations, voice typing, widgets, Material You theme options, privacy toggles, copy/paste across devices via Nearby Share (Google’s answer to Apple’s AirDrop), and a Kids Space for child-friendly content. You’ll also have access to Google’s Circle to Search feature and the Gemini AI Assistant. Unlike the iPad and iOS, Android supports multi-profile accounts; this is a big advantage if you want to share a tablet with family members.

A good number of most-used apps look great on the Pixel Tablet. One of the biggest issues we have with Android tablets is how apps look on a bigger tablet screen. According to Google, more than 80 apps were optimized for the Pixel Tablet at launch, though most of them are Google apps. Only a few dozen third-party apps are optimized for the tablet, but they are pretty major ones: Disney+, ESPN, Hulu, Lumafusion, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, and WhatsApp all have Android versions that look great on the Pixel Tablet. Since its launch, Google has added more optimized apps like Diablo Immortal, Adobe Lightroom, Peloton, Paramount Plus, and more.

The battery life is great. In our testing, the Pixel Tablet’s 5,000 mAh battery mostly lived up to Google’s battery-life claim of 12 hours on a single charge. If you’re watching videos with the display at full brightness or playing graphics-intensive games, it won’t last as long. For the fastest charge, you should use a 27 W USB-C charger instead of the charging dock, which is limited to 15 W.

The camera is decent enough for video chats. The Pixel Tablet has a perfectly fine camera system with an 8-megapixel 1080p lens on both the front and rear. The camera software offers standard Google photo features such as Night Sight, Long Exposure, and Portrait mode, but it doesn’t produce Pixel 8–quality photos and videos. Still, images come out clear and with minimal grain in sufficient lighting, which is good enough for video chatting with friends and family.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Stylus support is limited. According to Google, only USI 2.0–compliant styluses are compatible; the Lenovo USI Pen 2 and Penoval USI 2.0 styluses are among the few that work with the Pixel Tablet. We tested an Amazon Fire Max 11 stylus, which worked just fine, but if you want a tablet that you can draw or write on, the Pixel Tablet may not be right for your needs.