The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years. At an Android event today, the company finally unveiled the culmination of all this work: Googlebooks.
We’re bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world’s most popular browser. The result is Googlebook: a new category of laptops built with Gemini’s helpfulness at its core, designed to work seamlessly with the devices in your life and powered by premium hardware. We’re sharing a sneak peek into the Googlebook experience today and will have a lot more to share later this year.
↫ Alex Kuscher at The Keyword, a Google blog apparently
The approach here seems very similar to Chromebooks, with Googlebooks being designed and built by various OEMs, but instead of Chrome OS they run Android in desktop mode. Of course, “AI” has been creamed all over these things, to the point where not even the venerable mouse cursor is safe: if you wiggle your cursor, it will turn into “Magic Pointer”, which will highlight various “AI” actions as you hover over stuff on your screen. Google also showed off an “AI”-based feature to create widgets, as well as the ability to access files on your phone right from a Googlebook.
That’s about all we know as far as functionality and features goes. They’re supposed to go on sale later this year, with models coming from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
Googlebook
aka
Slopbook
This abstract for Google Book literally reads like “written by committee” for a product “designed by committee”.
“Shipping your organization chart”
This is a well known phenomenon where the internal structure inevitably affects the outside products that a company produces. And apparently, for one reason or another, the Chrome Org has been subdued by the Android org, and now they are celebrating it by releasing a product that nobody actually needed or wanted.
Why?
The Chrome OS already had pretty good Android support, and was excellent for both laptop and desktop form factors. Android on the desktop on the other hand was always laggy.
In other words there is no technical or product reason for this
Okay, the absolute irony here…
They can’t even stop developing Chromebooks for at least 10 years
I don’t know what the heck they were thinking, but they sold 10 year commitments to schools and large organizations for both software and hardware support.
(So they will have to convince Asus and hp to continue releasing products on a dying platform)
Unless they are ready to buy out those agreements with billions of fines (and massive loss of remaining brand trust)… they will have to keep the core team continue to push Chrome OS for the foreseeable future.
(I wonder what exactly is going on there)
I don’t see Google announcing Googlebooks as renegging on their Chromebook commitments. Obviously they’ll shift development focus to Android on desktop but that shouldn’t mean they have to shut down their Chrome team – just phase the team out over the remaining period of support for institutional purchasers. Other than providing security patches, ChromeOS for institutional customers can be put in maintenance mode for most of the remaining term of their contracts. And when those contracts are up, they get Googlebooks. However, I don’t think anyone should rush out to their local retailer and buy a Chromebook today.
samcrumugeon,
I wish I was as optimistic.
With Chrome + Android teams merged… the combined team subject to layoffs for “efficiency”, and basically all Chrome OS advocates departing Google, leaving only enough to sustain one operating system…
How can they actually supply 10 years of support, even if they really wanted to?
(I mean they could not even maintain their app apis)
In unrelated news, Asus has launched Asus Open https://www.asus.com/no/content/asus-open/
I know what I want.
tingo,
I’m not a big fan of these marketing websites, hard to get real info from it. Plain old HTML please.
Anyway, yeah Asus has identified a DIY audience that have been largely undeserved by mainstream manufacturers. A product made for OS power users that doesn’t need jailbreaking / hacking / warranty invalidation / etc sounds good to me. OS news should review it 🙂
I could see myself getting one although apparently it’s not sold in the US.
The operating system is not Android itself, but rather a most likely, Linux based, Aluminium OS.