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