Why Is Everyone Talking About This Stylus for a Canceled Pixel Tablet?

I understand rehashing the past to look for clues, but what is the point if it will remind you of what you don’t have? (Stop looking at those old journal archives, Flo.) We know we’re not getting the Google Pixel Tablet 2 anymore, despite the overall positive reviews that the first-generation received after its messy launch in 2023. So it seems cruel to repetitively beat on a dead horse over something that will never be resurrected, at least not anytime soon.

Why are we talking about the Pixel Tablet stylus that never was and, reportedly, never will be? It’s a torturous moot point. Android Authority posted what it says is a rendering of what was going to be the magic wand to unlock all of the Pixel Tablet 2’s potential. The “Pen for Google Pixel Tablet” had the code name “bushukan,” which shares an alias with the citrus fruit known as Buddha’s hand. The pen model was/is referred to as model “GM0KF.” If you search for that and “pixel stylus,” you’ll get everything the blogosphere has written about this unreleased pen.

The stylus would have supposedly existed in two colors, white and gray, probably to match the colorways of the Pixel Tablet 2. The pen had a button on the top that you could press to launch a note-taking app. I took a screenshot of Android Authority’s embedded video and pasted it below. The diagram shows us it’s pretty standard stylus behavior. The pen would have magnetically docked onto an official keyboard accessory that will no longer see the light of day. It had Find My Device integration in case you needed to locate it within the depths of your couch cushions or wherever else you might lose a stylus to bulk padding.

Google was reportedly going to launch a second-generation Pixel Tablet this year but canceled it a few weeks ago. We had renders percolating around Android blogs all year and even the aforementioned keyboard folio to go with it—something the first-gen Pixel Tablet lacked because it was billed as a sort of mobile smart home device rather than a productivity machine like the OnePlus Pad, which debuted around the same time.

It’s not likely we’ll see this stylus crop up separately from a tablet device. This is a shame because the last time Google did something with a stylus, it showed promise. Remember the Pixelbook? I still have one right here, physically near me, for whenever I feel like taking out its flippable clamshell design to remember what could have been. I still have the stylus that went with the Chromebook. It had a button where your thumb resides so you could easily tap it for additional functionality. The stylus, coupled with the Chromebook, was not bad! I used it for note-taking at several conferences throughout the 2-in-1’s lifetime. But it sounds like Google is planning to distance itself from the productivity gadget trajectory in favor of the connected home. The Pixel Tablet 2 was likely shelved to focus on something else with a big screen that fits into a personal domain.