Googlebook ➹

I am very late to this party (it was announced at I/O last week and I’ve been buried in other things), but Google is replacing Chromebooks with “Googlebooks”–Android-based laptops with Gemini baked in, designed to sync with your phone.

On the face of it, this looks like yet another Google rebranding exercise, and considering what happened with the Pixel and Google’s penchant for unveiling “category defining” devices they never actually sell worldwide, My first reaction was “meh”.

But with Android’s recent support for desktop windowing, resizable apps and Linux sandboxing, this is actually very interesting for me–because it means you can have a laptop that runs Android apps natively, has a proper desktop shell, and can spin up a Linux container for development work. All on ARM hardware.

If they get the desktop UX right (which is a big “if” given Google’s track record with consistency–I’ve set up Android 16 on a Pi and it sucks), this could be a genuinely compelling alternative to both Chromebooks and cheap Windows laptops–especially for people who already live in the Android ecosystem and want something that doesn’t fight them the way iPadOS does.