Googlebooks are phone-first, not ai-first

How much time do you spend on your phone? Depending on a series of factors, there's a pretty decent chance that you use it more often than your laptop or desktop PC, especially if you take work out of the equation. If so, you're the kind of person for whom a Googlebook laptop makes sense. At least if that phone is Android.

For the rest of you, us, it probably doesn't. And even if a more powerful, flexible, premium take on the Google-top-to-bottom setup of a Chromebook is appealing to you, actually buying into one right now might not sound so great when the cheapest Googlebook you can get is $900.

But with the devices getting their full reveal today, let's take a look at them. They're better than I thought they would be earlier this year…but still not enough to actually get me excited.

What is a Googlebook?

A Googlebook is a laptop from a mainstream manufacturer, with a familiar design, running a new Android-derived operating system (dubbed Aluminum) from Google. The hardware looks…well, like a laptop. It comes with a clamshell form factor, from the biggest names in the industry: Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Dell, and HP, to start. It runs on an Intel Core or Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (MediaTek is coming later). It has a keyboard, a touchpad, a touchscreen. It's a laptop.

The special sauce here is all in the software. And if you're used to Chromebooks and ChromeOS, you pretty much know what to expect. While this system is technically Android, it's set up with a standard desktop environment that should be comfortable enough to anyone who knows their way around Windows or MacOS. You'll be spending most of your time in the browser — Chrome is the only option, naturally — augmented by web apps and Android apps from the Play Store. Very Chrome-coded.

You do get access to the file system and a few more advanced tools, but don't expect a bevvy of third-party apps, as on Windows. Again, a lot like a Chromebook, just a more modern take on it.

If you've used a Pixel phone in the last few years, things might look very familiar here. In addition to Google's Material Expressive interface, you get default access to mobile-style widgets on the desktop, and the whole thing kind of feels like a phone UI blown up to laptop size. Not in a bad way, mind you — the simplified, focused look is kind of refreshing coming from both the more complex Windows 11, and the far less complex Samsung DeX.

Laptops for phone people

I was expecting Googlebooks to be essentially an entire platform dedicated to Google's Gemini "AI." And there's certainly a lot of it in here, starting from the cursor and working up. But whether as a response to the initial press coverage or as a more internal drive, the positioning of Googlebooks seems to have changed. This isn't a device devoted to Gemini, it's a laptop that works with — and in many ways is secondary to — your Android phone.

Logging into a Googlebook with your Google account automatically connects it to your Android phone. You get near-instant access to all the apps on your phone, in a connected fashion that's more solid and natural than "streaming" apps were before. You get wireless access to your phone's complete file system, something that's notoriously finicky between Android and basically any full desktop OS. You can use an app on your phone, switch over to your Googlebook, and the app will appear on your taskbar as an icon. Click it, and you can continue your session.

For tools like Google Docs and Google Keep, it's seamless in an impressive way. It's all wireless, operating over local LAN or mobile connections. It's instant. It's comfortable. It's quickly accessible from the desktop. A Googlebook works in cooperation with an Android phone at just about every place it can, in a setup that's far more natural than previous connections between Android and ChromeOS or Windows. Of course all of your notifications are synced, and for apps that support it, seeing a notification on one screen means you won't need to repeat it on the other.

There are other hints that all of this is running on Android. You get access to the Play Store for literally millions of apps…but that's also true of Chromebooks, and it hasn't really moved the needle for most users. Android apps will run natively on Googlebooks, and the vast majority will be phone- or tablet-shaped, so it's good that all of the initial batch of Googlebook laptops have touchscreens.

At least a few apps from the Play Store will have a larger, dedicated laptop interface, though how prevalent that will be remains to be seen. Photoshop, Canva, and CapCut were mentioned specifically in the press presentation.

What can't Googlebooks do?

Here's the downside. Because the system is based on Android, you'll be relying on those mobile-first apps for anything you want to do outside of the browser. For a lot of things, that's fine — Netflix and Disney+ apps support video downloads, for example, to give you stuff to watch on a trip.

More specialized tools will be tricky. Googlebooks can't run Windows or Mac apps, not even in a translation layer or emulator, at least at launch. (I suppose you could run these in an Android-based tool, but now we're going full Inception.) In fact, Googlebooks can't even run Linux apps, at least not in the same way Chromebooks can. While there's a Linux virtual environment baked into the OS, it's mostly for AI tasks on these chips' integrated NPUs. You can't just stick a shortcut for a Linux app on the taskbar, more's the pity.

Googlebooks are also pretty lacking in the world of games. Again, you're leaning very heavily on Android for local games. There are tons of great Android games, and plenty of them work with a controller. But one of the examples given to me was Skul the Hero Slayer, which defaulted to the incredibly awkward arrow keys for movement and C for a jump button. It runs fine, but the experience is unpolished.

What about more serious games? PC games? Well, Google recommends GeForce Now streaming. In fact, it'll give you a year of free premium access if you buy a Googlebook. Wouldn't it be great if Google had its own PC game streaming platform? Wouldn't it be great if Steam ran on Googlebooks, like it kinda-sorta-almost did on Chromebooks? If wishes were horses. Suffice it to say, gamers of almost all stripes will find Googlebooks underwhelming.

And perhaps the biggest drawback to Googlebooks as a platform, or even a concept, is that iPhone users aren't invited to the vast majority of this party. Because of Apple's walled garden, you'll get notification and text syncing to iOS. That's it. iPhone users have essentially no reason to go with a Googlebook over a MacBook, or even a Windows laptop.

What about all the AI?

I attended Google's presentation with PCWorld's AI expert Ben Patterson, who can break down the AI baked into Googlebooks much more effectively than I can. But as someone who tries to avoid generative LLMs at all times, I was a little surprised that Gemini was far less emphasized than it was elsewhere. There's a dedicated button on the keyboard (Caps Lock, where Search used to be on Chromebooks). It is, famously, baked into the cursor. But you can ignore it if you want.

To the same degree that Android and Chrome are now infested with Gemini, in much the same way Windows is afflicted with Copilot, Googlebooks are "designed for Gemini intelligence." What that amounts to is an NPU at approximately 45 tops that can do a few things locally, notably Rambler voice dictation…and there are a lot of hooks to pop out to Gemini for other stuff. This includes text creation and modification, photo generation…you know, all the things you've been hearing about for the last two years, whether you want it or not.

The "magic pointer" feature is mildly interesting to me, if only for accessibility purposes. Wiggle your cursor around at any time, and you get a chance to click on one or multiple elements of what's on screen to get more context, or modify them. I was shown a tool to create a photo collage of two snapshots of the same dog. The resulting collage was…two photos side by side. One of which was clearly an AI-generated impression of said dog, but not the same photo it pulled from.

You can turn at least some of these tools off, some of the time, by diving into the settings menu. You can, allegedly, keep the data sharing with Google to a minimum. You can log onto the laptop in guest mode, just like ChromeOS, and get no more tracking than…well, than someone browsing Chrome without logging in. How much you trust Google (or, to be fair, Microsoft or Apple) not to track your usage is a question best left to an expert like Alaina Yee. The Google and brand representatives at the event didn't have much to say beyond, "yes, you can turn it off."

I was, as you can probably tell, underwhelmed. While the integration with the user interface is impressive, the actual capability of these tools hasn't gone too far beyond Google's Circle to Search on Android. And there's still very little you can do with a Googlebook that can't also be achieved in a ChatGPT tab.

Googlebooks get access to Google Antigravity and a full terminal environment, and it's possible to do some interesting things like generate your own apps or widgets…though I wasn't able to actually wait around long enough to see those finished to completion. If you're super into local AI (and if you are, you should be subscribed to our Prompt Mode newsletter!), I get the impression that you're looking at a far more powerful Windows or Mac laptop to do things locally.

Speaking of which…

Googlebook hardware: They're laptops

At the media event showing off the first round of Googlebook designs, there were five laptops on display. They had a few commonalities, like touchscreens, at least 16GB of RAM, Intel and Qualcomm processors with fairly beefy NPUs, and pretty decent materials and builds.

But these are essentially just laptops. The Asus model with its distinct finish reminded me of my Zenbook A14. The Dell model got an XPS label, and indeed, it's light and sleek enough to earn that distinction. If it weren't for the different operating system, I'd have confused it for the latest XPS 13.  The Acer model, the cheapest at a projected MSRP of $900 was a little cheaper-feeling than some of the others, and not unreasonable for that.

The only visual indication that these aren't standard Windows laptops, aside from the Google flair under the keyboard and the different logos on the keys, is the Glowbar. This is a fun bit of branding that debuted waaaaay back on the Chromebook Pixel in 2013, and seen a few times after in other Google-branded hardware. This one is positioned on the exterior of the laptop lid. And it's a disappointment.

The glowbar glows in multiple colors when you open your laptop, at which point it shows a little mini-lightshow to…whoever is sitting in front of you, I suppose. Then it glows white. It shows another rainbow effect when you close the laptop. It shows a battery readout when you plug in a charger. That's about it.

When shown the hardware at the event, I tapped at the bar on the closed laptop, expecting to see a battery display pop up, like it does on my dear, departed Pixel C tablet. Then I tapped it again, and nothing happened. I confirmed with the representatives that none of the initial Googlebooks feature the hardware necessary to interact with the glowbar on a closed laptop. Damn, that would have been really useful — many's the time I've had to boot up a long-dormant laptop just to check its battery charge before a trip.

And that's about it, as far as the different designs are concerned. All of the initial Googlebooks seem like barely-changed, existing laptop designs. They're all nice, solid machines, and like all laptops in 2026, they'd be much more enticing at prices that haven't been walloped by the RAM and chip shortage. There's some irony in the fact that "AI," part of the big selling point of this entire platform, is making it much less appealing as a purchase for real users.

Should you buy a Googlebook?

Thinking over the Googlebook event, I did an informal survey among my friends, family, and coworkers. I asked how much time they spent on their phones versus their laptops or desktops, not counting what they did for a living.

I was surprised. Among people ranging from their 20s to almost 70, it was about half and half for those who preferred to spend time on the small, mobile device, versus a more comfortable, conventional computer setup. I was expecting far more of a slant towards mobile in 2026, and who chose which wasn't entirely predictable.

A lot of my coworkers here at PCWorld — people whose entire professional lives revolve around the PC — admitted they spent much more time on their phones. My father, who spent 40 years in various flavors of computer science and IT, is now on his phone much more. My mother, a nurse and teacher who's retired, still prefers to use a laptop even though she doesn't really need to. Young 20-somethings wanted laptops, 30-somethings with kids wanted phones, and both on either side of things.

My point is this: There's a very particular user for whom I think a Googlebook makes sense. Someone who spends most of their time on a phone, and who only uses a laptop or desktop out of necessity. Maybe they need to type something long, or watch a video on a more comfortable screen, or do some research that requires juggling multiple tabs and windows. But their life is on their phone, and they don't do much on a PC, particularly gaming or specialized tools.

There are more of those people around, and in more varied places in both life and tech, than I might have guessed before. For those people, a Googlebook might be really appealing. It'll be more comfortable than a Windows laptop, it'll feel more integrated with their digital life.

If, and this is a big if, they use Android. iPhone users are still better off with a Mac for that purpose, to no great surprise.

The other big "if" is the price. The Acer Googlebook starts at $900. The other, nicer options quickly get into the $1100-1300 range. That's a pretty good chunk of change to spend on a Windows laptop, even one with 16GB of RAM, a touchscreen, and some nice materials. It's a lot more to spend on a brand new platform and category like Googlebooks.

I'd definitely recommend a lot of research before you make that particular call. The first batch of Googlebooks will hit retailers in just a couple of weeks, and preorders start today.