I tried all 5 Googlebook launch laptops – here are 5 things I learned

Google’s making a pretty big splash in the laptop market with the hyped-up arrival of its Googlebook machines. "These aren’t your grandma’s Chromebooks" is basically the subtext, and at a hands-on event in London last week, I got extended time with all five launch models.

Those laptops are coming from Dell, Asus, HP, Lenovo and Acer, and they run the gamut from lightweight 15-inch beauties to impressively compact little 13-inch numbers. After handling all five for a few hours, here’s what I learned.

GooglebookOS leans heavily on AI integrations to stand out

This isn’t really news, but Google’s really leveraging its advantage with Gemini when it comes to the laptop experience it’s built over the last few years.

Its spokespeople were keen to call the new software suite an “intelligence system” rather than an operating system, and that’s a little hard to swallow. Still, Gemini is basically laced right through the OS, and it’s impressively integrated.

Where a Windows laptop has a Windows key, Google now has a G key that launches an app tray slash start menu. Press and hold the G key, then tap the actual “g” key, though, and you’ll bring up Gemini, something that you can also do by wiggling your pointer or pressing an icon on the top-right of the laptop’s taskbar.

This will have you querying on-screen items, making Gemini requests and more within seconds, and it’s slicker than Apple’s Siri equivalent, or indeed Copilot. If you're a big Gemini user, this might just make the OS a great way to cut out the middleman in requests.

The glowbar might just be a snazzy distraction

Google’s presentation and marketing of its Googlebooks is leaning quite hard on the glowbar that adorns each one of them on the outside of their case.

That bar is a nice little touch, and it has one important and actually useful integration – converting into a charging bar when your laptop is plugged in. Beyond that, though, it’s basically just a little RGB light that won’t change your experience with the laptops. There are far more consequential features and changes elsewhere!

Android users will be right at home

For a long time, people have been wondering whether Apple might just merge macOS and iPadOS, as the two have become more and more similar. Well, it feels a little like Google skipped the queue and did just that for Android and ChromeOS, with the result being GooglebookOS.

The OS very much feels like the flagship native Android experience, with proper laptop computing power behind it, scaled up and properly designed to work as a desktop.

There’s a pretty serious limitation in the form of a developer’s approach to optimisation. Take Netflix as an example that Google was keen to point out for demo purposes.

Browsing the “desktop” version of its Android app, much of the interface was still on-screen in vertical mode, with letterboxing on either side, like your phone screen was just being mirrored.

Starting playback, though, resulted in landscape video that took up the whole screen (and went fullscreen). So, that’s a slightly weird journey but one that ends up in a great, laptop-scale viewing experience.

While that might sound like a mixed bag, though, most of the integration with Android was extremely impressive. Once your phone's paired with your laptop, for instance, the Files browser on the machine can access your phone's files as if they were right there on your hard drive – that's hugely handy, and becomes even more useful with AI-powered search.

This lets you search for files not just based on their file name, as is traditionally the way, but also based on subject and text within photos. So, for instance, right there in Files you could search for "cat" and get results featuring cats.

The value proposition is far from open-and-shut

Laptop prices are all out of whack right now. Dell’s the best example, given the almost tragic pricing of the otherwise pretty magic XPS 13 this year.

Google won’t say anything on this front, but it surely would have loved to be able to launch its Googlebook lineup with a minimum price of £700 or even £800. Instead, the most affordable laptop in the lineup will still be £999, and that means the compromises of ditching Windows or macOS.

Now, it’s worth saying that the laptops I handled at the hands-on event felt impressively premium, pretty much as a rule. Still, their prices are eyebrow-raising.

They also raise the question of where Google goes next with Googlebooks, and I think the answer is almost certain to be "cheaper" at some point. It's positioning the laptops as upgrades on a Chromebook, with more functionality and power, but given you can get a Chromebook for a fifth of the price of one of these machines, there's room for a middle ground.

Perhaps the AI features require more RAM than manufacturers can comfortably pack in without pumping the price up, but I'd still feel comfortable making a chunky wager that we see Googlebooks for a couple hundred less than these launch models before too long.

ChromeOS isn’t dead

Speaking of Chromebooks, eh? When Google talked us through the operating system that these new laptops would run on, it took a surprising amount of time to actually mention its name – Googlebook OS. It was keen to talk about its architecture (which is based on Linux blended with Android, basically), but not necessarily to talk about it as a new software product.

When I asked about this, I was told it was basically because consumers don’t, on average, care enough about the OS underpinning a laptop, but rather about what it’s capable of. That might be, but the arrival of a brand new OS like this begs the question – what happens to Google’s existing OS, ChromeOS?

Well, the short answer is apparently “nothing”, at least for now. Chromebooks will continue as their own product category, with a bunch set to launch in the next 12 months.

When I put it to a Google spokesperson that this looked like Chromebooks were the entry-level option, and Googlebooks the more mid- and high-end one, they basically said that was how they look at the situation, too.

Then again, given the huge presence it has in education and other sectors that rely on low-cost machines, is it any wonder that Google wouldn't just arbitrarily move on from ChromeOS like that?