The Pixel Tablet is coming in 2023

Google’s last tablet was the ill-fated Pixel slate, a device that was widely criticized — so much so that in 2019, Google said it wouldn’t make tablets anymore. In classic fashion, though, the company is changing its tune. Today as part of its hardware presentation at Google I/O 2022, Google teased the Pixel Tablet, a premium Android-powered device that’s set to arrive sometime in 2023. 

As this product is months away from being released, Google is only giving us a scant few details right now. Rick Osterloh, Google’s SVP of devices and services, said that the Pixel Tablet is a “premium” device that will run on the company’s custom Tensor chips, just like the latest Pixel phones. What we haven’t heard is how much it’ll cost, how big the screen is or when it will be released. We can say that, based on the renders we saw, it looks a bit like someone just took the screen off a Nest Hub.

Naturally, the new tablet will run Google’s version of Android specifically built for larger screens, an initiative that’s been in the works for a while now. Historically, the big knock against Android tablets is that the software never feels like it’s built for the bigger screen, and that apps aren’t optimized to use this bigger view. Even with changes made to Android to support larger screens, it doesn’t necessarily mean developers will build their apps to take advantage of that space. 

But Osterloh told reporters in a briefing ahead of I/O that Google has clearly heard that users want a larger-screen Pixel experience to compliment their phones — so the company is at least seeing some level of consumer demand for such a device. Whether that leads into market adoption is another question entirely, as neither Chrome OS nor Android tablets ever caught on in a significant way. Samsung has had some success with its Galaxy Tab line and Amazon’s budget lineup of Fire tablets have both stuck around, but Apple’s iPad remains dominant. 

Given that this device won’t be out until sometime in 2023, it’s far too early to predict if Google has learned from its past mistakes in the tablet arena. But the company made a commitment at I/O to rebuild more than 20 of its apps for large-screen devices, and huge developers like Facebook, TikTok and Zoom are on board as well. If more third-party developers get on board by the time the Pixel Tablet arrives, it could have a shot at redefining what we think of when it comes to premium Android tablets.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Google is getting serious about building apps for Android tablets again

For a few months now, Google has been talking about Android 12L, an upcoming version of Android that’s focused on making the OS work better on larger-screen devices like tablets and foldable phones. Thus far, most of those changes have focused on interface tweaks, but today at Google I/O the company had some news about making apps perform better on larger screens, too. 

Google says more than 20 of its apps will be redesigned and optimized for tablets, something that should automatically make Android taps a lot more useful. Among those are YouTube Music, Google Maps and Messages. YouTube Music has a redesigned now playing screen that takes advantage of the extra screen space, while Messages has a multi-column view to quickly jump between different conversations. Google also says that third-party apps like Facebook, TikTok and Zoom will soon be updated to be better optimized for large screens, too. If Google can get more big developers like these on board, the Android tablet ecosystem should benefit greatly. 

Google also says that there are 270 million active users already using large-screen devices, so there’s a decent number of people who’ll be able to take advantage of these updates immediately. To find them, Google Play is getting a large-screen redesign as well that will highlight apps built for tablets. 

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

John McEnroe is playing tennis against a virtual version of himself on ESPN+

Michelob Ultra and ESPN have decided to use AI to answer an enduring question: what would happen if tennis legend John McEnroe played against himself? An upcoming ESPN+ special entitled “McEnroe vs. McEnroe” will feature the 63-year-old star, who retired from singles competition in 1992, playing against a complicated, AI-trained version of himself. 

According to TechCrunch, the process for the actual game is fairly involved. After the real McEnroe sends a ball over the net, the AI avatar responds to its direction and “swings” — at this point, a new ball is launched from a ball cannon, which is obscured by a smokescreen. The positioning of the ball cannon and smokescreen are designed to make the ball appear as if it’s coming off the avatar’s racket. The avatar itself is projected onto a hologram particle screen. This teaser below shows off a tantalizingly small amount of footage.

As for how this all came together, the real McEnroe spent a day with production company Unit 9, who used full-body motion capture and scans combined with Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman Creator technology. Adweek says that the McEnroe avatar and its programming are based on five different points in McEnroe’s career, including his debut in 1979, his ascent to the top of the sport in 1981, and his final year as a pro in 1992.

Besides the work with the real McEnroe, Unit 9 also analyzed hundreds of hours of footage from his career and recorded 308 different shots for the virtual avatar. Given that McEnroe is now 63, he’ll be playing against a much younger version of himself — whether or not that means the AI will have the edge remains to be seen, of course. If this somewhat odd matchup has piqued your interest, TechCrunch says the special will air tonight, May 7th, on ESPN+ at 10PM ET. 

Elon Musk wants to quadruple Twitter users by 2028

Among the biggest questions on people’s mind since Elon Musk made his bid to buy Twitter is how the service might change under his ownership. We’re still a long way off from the deal becoming official, but Musk nonetheless has had to pitch investors on his vision for the company to get the funding he needs. As it so happens, the New York Times has obtained a copy of a pitch deck for investors, which gives us an idea of the preposterously grand vision that Musk has for the company. Here are a few highlights.

For starters, Musk wants to grow Twitter’s monthly users from the 217 million it had at the end of 2021 to nearly 600 million in 2025 and 931 million users by 2028. That’s more than quadrupling its monthly users in the next six years. Musk also wants to have 104 million paid subscribers for a service only referred to as “X.” There weren’t any details on what sort of product X would be, but Musk has cryptically hinted at an ad-free paid Twitter experience. 

Speaking of paying for Twitter, Musk’s pitch deck has a lot of details on some ambitious revenue goals, as well. He believes that Twitter can quintuple its annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028, up from the approximately $5 billion the company made last year. And Musk wants to significantly diversify how Twitter makes money, as well. Right now, advertising makes up about 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue; Musk wants to cut that to about 45 percent by 2028. His forecast would include $12 billion in advertising revenue and $10 billion in subscription revenue. 

To meet those lofty goals, Twitter would obviously need a lot more paid users. Musk forecasted 69 million Twitter Blue users by 2025 and 159 million by 2028. Twitter Blue is a $3 per month service that launched in the US this past November and offers perks like ad-free news articles, the ability to undo sending a tweet and a few other small niceties. Between the mysterious product X and Twitter Blue, Musk is clearly putting a lot of importance on getting users to opt into some sort of paid Twitter experience.

Finally, Musk sees Twitter making some moves in the payment space as well. He wants the company to bring in a modest $15 million in revenue from a payments business in 2023, with that number growing to around $1.3 billion by 2028. Currently, Twitter offers very limited shopping and tipping features that the NYT says make no notable impact on the company’s bottom line. 

The NYT didn’t have any details on how Musk expects to meet these lofty goals — only that he expects big things from Twitter once his takeover is complete. Quadrupling users and quintupling revenue is an extremely tall order for a company like Twitter that’s already well established. But Musk clearly didn’t want to spend $44 billion on Twitter just to keep the status quo. 

Steam on a Chromebook works better than I expected

For about as long as Chrome OS has existed, gaming has been one of its most notable Achilles’ heels. Most Chromebooks have lower-power hardware, and the OS is built on web technology, so playing AAA titles found on Windows has simply not been an option. The rise of cloud-based gaming services like Google’s own Stadia have helped the situation, but perhaps the biggest advance in Chromebook gaming came in late March, when Google announced that Valve’s Steam platform was in an early alpha phase on Chrome OS. Just as you can on Windows, Mac and Linux, this lets you download and install games from the vast Steam catalog. As a Chromebook fan who also loves a good game, I had to give this a shot.

So Google provided me with one of the seven Chromebooks that can run Steam, an ASUS Chromebook CX9 with Intel’s 11th-generation Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage space. These are hefty specs for a Chromebook, but Google specified that Steam required a device with at least a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. While Steam may eventually work with lower-powered devices, it’s clear that many Chromebooks simply won’t be able to cut it. But if you do have the right hardware, the Steam experience is pretty good, so long as you keep your expectations in check.

I didn’t have any problems getting Steam installed, but it’s a lot more complicated than setting it up on a Windows computer. You’ll need to switch your Chromebook to the Dev channel, so don’t do this on a machine you rely on for daily use. After that, you’ll need to enable a specific flag in Chrome and type a few commands into the Chrome OS Crosh terminal. Once that’s done, Steam will download to your machine, at which point you can login and start downloading games.

Right off the bat, any game that is supported in Steam for Linux can be installed without any compatibility issues. As I’m a massive Half-Life fan, the first two games I tried out were Valve’s own Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 — two old games that don’t require powerful hardware. Both, unsurprisingly, played like a charm. There were rare frame rate drops, but the experience felt identical to playing them on Windows or on a Mac.

At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I decided to get crazy and install 2018’s God of War, originally released for the PS4 and ported to Windows in January of this year. It was a totally unplayable slideshow. That’s no surprise, though, as God of War calls for either NVIDIA’s GTX 960 or AMD’s R9 290X graphics cards with 4GB of memory. The Chromebook’s integrated Intel Iris X graphics aren’t in the same league. This is no real knock on the Chromebook, though, because a Windows machine with the same specs wouldn’t be able to run God of War, either. I was mostly surprised that I was able to install it at all.

To install games like God of War, or any other titles that don’t have a native Linux version, you’ll need to turn on the experimental Steam Play compatibility tools. Once I did that, though, I could install just about any game I came across. Obviously, demanding games like God of War aren’t going to work, but there are still tons of titles in the Steam library that are worth checking out. Both Hades and Cuphead ran flawlessly, and Fallout 4 worked pretty well too. It wasn’t as smooth as the other games I tried, but the first few hours were definitely playable.

The main catch is that the first time you run games using compatibility tools, they’re extremely slow to load. Steam has to “process Vulkan shaders” for a lot of titles, and this can take five to ten minutes or more on some games (like Fallout 4). Fortunately, this only happens the first time you launch a particular title.

Most of the games I tried were from Google’s own list of recommended titles that had been tested on Chrome OS, and those experiences were almost all solid. The one game my Chromebook couldn’t quite keep up with was The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Google recommended playing that one with graphics on low, and said that only Chromebooks with an i7 processor would work. Even then, frame rates and control responsiveness was poor enough that I didn’t want to play after a few minutes.

While Google and Valve will certainly improve the Steam experience from this early alpha, it’s fair to say that Chrome OS will never be the place to play cutting-edge games. Chromebooks just aren’t built with that kind of hardware.

But, Steam’s library is vast, and there are thousands of titles across any genre that you can think of. Bringing that catalog to Chrome OS is a huge step forward for those who love games but don’t necessarily need to play Cyberpunk 2077 with settings on high. Whether it’s for replaying older classics like Portal 2 or trying newer releases like Hades, Steam for Chrome OS vastly expands the gaming you can do on a Chromebook. And if you really want to play The Witcher 3 or God of War, a streaming service like NVIDIA’s GeForce Now can plug the gap. So far, the alpha build of Steam for Chrome OS is promising, and I hope that Google and Valve can make it work on more Chromebooks before long.

The best gifts to upgrade your grad’s tech setup

Every spring, a new class of graduates is unleashed on the world, many of them carrying gadgets that have been put through the ringer over the years. Graduation is traditionally a big time for gift-giving — so if you know someone who is heading out int…

Sonos is reportedly releasing a $250 soundbar in June

Sonos isn’t exactly known for affordability, but the company has released a few more inexpensive products in recent years like the portable Roam speaker. Now, according to The Verge, Sonos is going to release its first budget soundbar in the first week of June. Apparently codenamed “Fury,” this product is expected to cost around $250, which makes it significantly cheaper than the $449 second-generation Beam (pictured above) and the $899 Arc.

As for what Sonos will leave out to hit this lower price point, the Fury won’t be able to output Dolby Atmos content like the Beam and Arc, and it may not even have an HDMI port; you’d hook it up to your TV with an optical audio cable. As such, it has fewer speaker drivers in it than other Sonos soundbars. It will be able to be part of a 5.1 surround sound setup using other compatible Sonos speakers — we presume that you can use speakers like the Sonos One as rear surrounds like you can with other Sonos soundbars. 

It sounds like Sonos will also skip including microphones for a voice assistant on this model to cut costs, like they did with the $159 Sonos Roam SL that was recently released.

One potentially intriguing feature is that Sonos will let the Fury work as rear surround speakers for a bigger soundbar like the Arc. As such, Sonos is apparently making vertical mounting stands for the Fury so that it can be used for Dolby Atmos content. 

There are plenty of budget soundbar options on the market from the likes of Vizio and Roku, while Sonos recently raised the prices on nearly all of its products. The original Beam sold for $399, but the new one costs $50 more, making for an even bigger gap between Sonos home theater options and those from more affordable competitors. As such, this is a pretty logical part of the market for Sonos to get into, and it’s not hard to imagine a $250 soundbar being a good product to get people into the company’s ecosystem. 

Sonos declined to comment on today’s leak.