Today, Google announced a new line of laptops called, creatively enough, Googlebooks. These are laptops that are built on Android that integrate tightly with your Android phone. The operating system itself is called Googlebook OS, and the idea is to give you a doorway into your phone through your laptop experience.
These new laptops are not Chromebooks. The fundamental difference being that these devices are not powered by ChromeOS. In order to give you the experience that Google wanted to give you, it had to start with Android. One product manager I spoke with indicated that the framework was key to building better experiences. They noted that when building out something like Quick Share, the ChromeOS team was continuously playing catch up to the new features introduced to the platform through Android because of the differing codebases.
Google noted that it “approached the technical stack differently…but is still all Google.” Google also pointed out that ChromeOS still has a place in the enterprise, education, and entry-level spaces — over 35 new Chromebook and Chromebook Plus devices will launch over the next 12 months.
Everyone is on board
At our Googlebook briefing, five different vendors showed up with hardware — HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus — and they were all very attractive in their own ways. The two that really stood out to me came from Asus and Acer. The Acer Googlebook was the only one that was a convertible with a 360-degree hinge. A key element in the primary Asus Googlebook was an extremely light weight at around 2.2 pounds.
Two different chipmakers represented as well. HP and Dell came rocking Qualcomm Snapdragon processors and the other three had Intel Core Ultra 3 (Panther Lake) processors. All of them had the Google-required LED glowbar on the cover (as you’ll see in the photo above). This is a thin RGB strip that lights up with you power up the laptop, shows the battery level, and Google opened up the API, and they’ve expressed that they cannot wait to see what the developers do with it.
Googlebooks will come with a minimum of 16GB of high-speed RAM and a battery life that allows a minimum of 14 hours of video playback or 16 hours of web browsing. So the implication here is that Googlebooks will be higher-end devices that are designed to work seamlessly with your Android phone. You’ll still get Chromebook-like experiences, but on better hardware and newer features.
What you’ll get
At a glance, there’s little to differentiate between a Chromebook and a Googlebook. Both provide you a desktop, multi-window experience, with a row of icons along the bottom of the laptop. You can mirror your phone’s apps on the laptop screen and use your mouse and keyboard for better productivity.
All this is linked with your Google account, and this is a key thing that has been missing up until now. This may be the first worldliest of first world problems, but for someone who has multiple phones, this is pretty key. All you need to do to link the laptop with your phone is be signed into the same Google account and be on the same Wi-Fi. Google takes care of everything from there.
Most computers require a basic level of proactive connection to enable features like this. You either need to scan a QR code or tell your computer, “this is the phone I want to use.” For many, granted, this is a one-time thing. For me, this is a weekly occurrence that’s cumbersome enough that I usually just don’t bother. This should alleviate that issue. This also works if you have a work phone and a regular phone. You can switch between them with a dropdown.
Software features designed to work together
One of the coolest features Google demoed for us was a sort of app continuity. In short, if you are working on a document on your phone, you’ll see the Google Docs icon appear in your taskbar, and if you click on that it’ll bring up that same document so you can pick up where you left off. It’s a small quality-of-life improvement that I can see being extremely useful to me, considering the bulk of my work is done in Google Docs and Google Drive. I’m very much looking forward to trying that out.
You can also search your phone’s content from the laptop. If you’re looking for an app, or a file, or you want to import a photo from the camera roll, they’re all accessible. Surprisingly, you can also connect an iPhone, though that’s limited to messaging and notifications.
One thing some of us noticed was some of the apps like Gmail and Google Drive on the Googlebook were essentially web containers for webapps. If you’re going to go to the trouble of designing a whole new operating system, why not build apps for it? There’s also no 90/10 multitasking on the Googlebook which feels like a miss, considering that’s something that more and more Android phones have supported.
What does the future look like?
The Googlebook has some really interesting ideas built into it. Building a laptop interface on top of your mobile operating system can be challenging, but Google seems to be taking some correct steps, but there are also some question marks. It’s early days, so we don’t know where this will ultimately land. It’s also worth mentioning that this is the third operating system for a company that is infamous for shutting projects.
But overall, I like what Google is doing here. A mobile OS designed for a laptop interface is a great idea, and ChromeOS isn’t that. The codebase is too different to achieve the tight integration that Google wants. But there are some hurdles to clear yet.
The biggest one is the same one that high-end Chromebooks have always faced: Why? Google has attempted to answer that question with this tight laptop to phone integration. If I sound like a broken “integration” record, that’s because that’s the primary argument that Google is making here. Whether or not that is enough of an answer will be up to you.
Googlebooks will start at $899. Every Googlebook with include 12 months of Google AI Pro with 5TB of Google Drive storage. Googlebook OS will also mirror the 10 years of updates that Chromebooks enjoy. You can preorder them at the Google store, Best Buy, and a few other retailers. They’ll go one general sale on October 4 in the U.S. and October 5 in Canada, select European countries, and Australia.