Pixel Tablet as a Nest Camera? Nope.

We had some folks ask after our initial write-up yesterday of the things you should first know about and do with the Pixel Tablet, so we wanted to make it clear here – No, the Pixel Tablet cannot act as a Nest Cam in the way that the Nest Hub Max can. In fact, the Pixel Tablet’s cameras are as basic as they come, like any budget tablet.

For those not familiar with the Nest Hub Max, it has a built-in 6.5MP camera with 127-degree field of view. While not the highest resolution camera on the block, the best feature of it is the fact that it can be used as a Nest Cam security camera. Should you have one in an office or living room or kitchen, you could use it to keep an eye on your house when you aren’t around. It’ll send you notifications if it detects motion or sound and everything.

On top of the security stuff, the built-in Nest Cam on the Nest Hub Max can take quick gestures that allow you to control volume or songs without needing to touch the device (great for the kitchen!) and match faces within your house hold to bring up their personal info streams.

The Google Pixel Tablet doesn’t do any of that. None of it. While the Pixel Tablet does have 8MP front and rear cameras, neither do security-related functions. These cameras are there for snapping photos or taking video calls and that’s about it.

If you want to see a comparison, just of the settings you have for the two devices within the Google Home app, the below image will show you how much they differ. The Pixel Tablet settings list is tiny and offers very little. However, a bunch of the settings for it are controlled from the tablet’s own settings Hub Mode page and other standard Android settings pages, so this isn’t the full representation of it. The big missing one is that Nest Cam option, obviously.

I’m only a couple of days into using the Pixel Tablet and can tell you now that I have already formed some opinions on this device and what Google did right and wrong.We’ll save that for later, as this was just to confirm to you that the Pixel Tablet doesn’t have Nest Cam functionality. We knew this already, but we want to further confirm the missing feature.

For those looking at the Pixel Tablet as a replacement for a Nest Hub Max, I’m not so sure it would be a proper replacement unless you really need a budget-level tablet that can also move with you around the house.