Murena, the French privacy firm that’s forked Android to deliver so-called deGoogled smartphones, has repeated the trick with a tablet. So if you’re keen to get your hands on a shiny Pixel Tablet — but without the usual bundle of Google apps and services — Murena has you covered.
The Murena Pixel Tablet runs the /e/OS open source operating system, rather than Google’s flavor of Android — hence the promise of a “privacy-focused Android experience” on the device’s 10.95-inch LCD display.
“Enjoy all the performance and versatility you need, while minimising data tracking, having a more secure experience, and with no Google services collecting your personal information,” Murena also writes. It says it added the tablet to the hardware selection it resells with /e/OS installed in response to “significant demand”.
The Pixel Tablet, which comes with 128 GB internal storage and 8 GB RAM, is available to buy from Murena’s online shop for €539 (or $549 in the U.S.).
Being deGoogled, you won’t find the Google Play Store itself on the device. Instead, /e/OS offers an app marketplace called App Lounge where users are able to download apps that are available in Google Play and F-Droid “anonymously” — although accessing paid apps does require signing in with a Google account. (For more on the trade-offs entailed in Murena’s app store workaround, read our earlier review of e/OS.)
While recreating a full app marketplace experience without any links to Google at all is clearly a hard problem, Murena has been busying itself in building privacy-focused alternatives for standalone apps like Google Drive and Office 365. So Pixel Tablet users can tap into a freemium file storage, backup and office suite offering called Workspace, that provides up to 1 GB of storage for free, and paid plans thereafter.