We had a play with Murena’s first tablet, a Google Pixel running /e/OS, its in-house de-Googled Android 13 with additional privacy features.
The Murena Pixel Tablet came out just last week, but The Register had its talons on a pre-release unit for a month. There are a few glitches here and there, but the experience is good, and we reckon it’s a decent option if you want a tablet that’s free of both Google and Apple.
Murena was founded by Mandrake Linux co-founder Gaël Duval, and we looked at one of the company’s first hardware products, the Murena One /e/OS smartphone back in 2022. The phone ran /e/OS 1.0, the company’s de-Googled flavor of Android. This tablet runs a much newer release. When we received it, it had version 2.6, but the first time we connected it to Wi-Fi it told us that /e/OS 2.7 was available, and that’s what we’ve been testing. The release notes mention Lineage OS 21, which is the Android 14-based version.
The hardware
The physical kit is a bit quicker to describe. It’s a Google Pixel tablet, as released in 2023, and its full specs show a decent enough device. (Note, this is neither a Google Pixel C nor a Google Pixel Slate, which were unrelated devices.) Among others, The Guardian looked at the Google version when it was new, and Android Authority did a longer-term test. The tablet’s specs are decent but not outstanding: 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of flash, a battery of just over 7,000 mAh. It lacks a few things you might reasonably expect such as slots for SIM or microSD cards, and there’s no headphone socket.
For comms on the move, we used Bluetooth to tether to our Android smartphone. This worked perfectly, and it’s much more battery-efficient than a Wi-Fi hotspot.
Murena’s tablet is a current-spec device, not some obsolete last-gen kit – as can be the case when it comes to some phones running Linux. Google’s version has a few extras, including a dock with built-in speakers, which turns it into both a smart display and “Hub” control screen for a Google Nest home-automation setup. Saying that, you can choose a bundle without the dock, which is what Murena offers.
Google’s version is available at a discount now, and we’ve seen it on sale (at least on US sites) for $299. Its original UK price was £599, and currently various sites are asking between £399 and £499.
The software
/e/OS 2.7 is Android 14, with all Google’s apps and services removed. So, for instance, the default web client is simply called “Browser,” based on Cromite version 131. For email, there’s “Mail” version 6.711, based on K9 Mail. The Maps app is from Magic Lane.
Murena’s /e/OS 2.7 is Android 14, with more privacy and less Google – click to enlarge
Instead of the Google Play store, there’s Murena’s own App Lounge. Because it doesn’t need any sign-in, it’s a bit more cluttered. There’s no tab for currently installed apps, although there is an Updates tab, which shows anything that needs freshening up. We tried a variety of Android apps, and they all worked fine.
Although they’re based on the same codebase, we found we could install Thunderbird for Android and use it side-by-side with Murena’s Mail with no problems. Thunderbird had the advantage that it imported all our accounts from the desktop version by just scanning a QR code. Similarly, we tried various alternative browsers, including Waterfox, Firefox, Vivaldi, and Opera. All were fine.
This is the advantage of de-Googled Android. It is just Android plus microG installed so that apps which expect to find Google products can launch and run.
The experience
As with the Murena One phone, we did encounter some problems and glitches.
There were issues trying to sync with cloud accounts. As The Register reported earlier this month, Murena has been suffering problems with its subscription-based cloud services for some months now. The company reactivated our dormant e.email account from 2022 for us, and once that was alive, the device could sign on and email worked fine. However, its cloud storage wasn’t working, and we also couldn’t get the Notes app to sign in.
In the Settings app, there are options to add Google and other existing accounts, but we couldn’t get Google Calendar or Contacts to sync until we installed DAVx⁵ – but then it Just Worked™.
We suspect that the failure of Murena’s own apps to sync is due to problems with the backend. A new page in the documentation, titled Back up my files after the Murena Workspace outage, suggests this is now resolved, but some user steps are needed.
Our Google sync problems may be our own fat fingers. One screen displayed a “sync from Google?” button, but we accidentally hit “no,” then could find no way to undo or change this. Installing the free version of DAVx⁵ from the App Lounge resolved this, though.
There’s not much point having a de-Googled Android device and then installing all the Google apps on it, so we avoided them. Alternatives are available (as some public TV channels are wont to mention). For example, we tried Microsoft’s Swiftkey keyboard and it worked fine. Because it’s just an Android device, you can choose services from non-giant vendors such as Dropbox.
/e/OS has its own app launcher called Bliss, which has no app tray. All app icons are placed directly on the home screen. There are two Navigation Modes on offer to flip between apps, which can be chosen in Settings | System | Gestures. One method, “3-button navigation,” has the dock permanently at the bottom of the screen, and merges your pinned favorite apps with old-time Android style back, home, and multitasking-view buttons. The other, “Gesture navigation,” uses swipes from the edges of the screen to go back, go home, or switch apps. We hit a problem with this mode. Newly installed apps didn’t appear on the home screen, although they can be found using the search box on the widgets screen, which is accessible by swiping right on the home screen. Switching back to 3-button navigation resolved it.
It’s not a problem as such, but when the Murena tablet is turned on, a slightly alarming warning screen appears, saying: “Your device is loading a different operating system.” It’s quickly replaced with a Google logo, then a pretty animated Murena one, but it might scare the less technical.
The experience is pretty good and feels smooth and professional, but whether its issues are deal-breakers depends a lot on the attitude of the buyer. We tend to find that folks who happily inhabit the big vendors’ walled gardens, such as Microsoft, Google, or Apple, and their services and accounts – even the free tiers – are quickly put off by glitches or extra config steps. For example, if you are the sort of person who’d rather pay £15 or $20 a month each for a few streaming services than manage your own MP3 collection, or run a BitTorrent client, or sync your own ebooks with Calibre, then you might well not like this.
On the other hand, if you don’t mind doing a little extra work to avoid having your data stored for you by giant foreign corporations with questionable records on privacy, then this is a decent offering.
Although Android phones have sold in the billions – which is why there are efforts to keep older ones alive, such as postmarketOS – Android tablets are less popular. We reckon this could be an opportunity for FOSS folks because a de-Googled tablet makes more sense than a de-Googled phone. It’s now common, even normal, to do contactless payments with a smartphone, use it to store tickets and membership cards, run banking apps, and so on. A device that can’t do this, or even makes it harder, is significantly crippled.
That’s much less true for tablets. They’re used for media consumption, browsing social networks, reading e-books and magazines, and so on. All that stuff works fine on alternative OSes. We found the overall user experience to be smoother and simpler than on more aggressively stripped-out mobile devices, such as the Punkt MC02 or FuriLabs’ FLX1.
(Maybe Canonical should have realized this before trying to crowdsource an Ubuntu phone. Famously, that effort failed, although the OS lives on as UBports and its next-gen UI is available in Debian 12. We suspect that a pure-Ubuntu tablet would have been much more useful than a smartphone.)
Another boon is that you don’t need any account or subscription to keep using Murena’s tablet. While the company does sell cloud subscriptions, you don’t require any subscription or account to use the hardware. The tablet works fine without it.
Although it is already on back-order, the Murena tablet is nominally available now for €539 in the EU, $549 in the US, and £449 in the UK. The adage is famous: If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Privacy costs in inconvenience as well as financially. The de-Googled version of the Pixel Tablet costs rather more than the ad-subsidized version from Google. It’s not a bargain-basement product, but if you want to keep your personal info off Google’s servers, you might consider it well worth it. ®