Almost 15 years since Google introduced Chromebooks and ChromeOS-which brought a wave of cheap, labor, internet laptops that would come to dominate the US education market—the company has announced a new tablet platform called Googlebook. It’s built using artificial intelligence and Android, and while it won’t replace Chromebooks, it could give the company a more meaningful place in the premium computing market.
Google announced the platform Android session on YouTube, where he also explained the new features coming in Android 17 and Gemini Intelligence (you can read more about it here) Google intentionally does not share the name of the operating system yet (it was codenamed Aluminum internal OS); Googlebook is the platform, and Dell, Acer, Asus, HP, and Lenovo have all signed up to produce Googlebooks coming later this fall.
The company says it will share more information later this year, but I spoke with Alexander Kuscher, the senior director at Google who heads Android tablets and laptops, to find out more. Kuscher says there’s a tremendous amount of innovation in the Android ecosystem right now, and it’s translating well into laptops.
“You want to take advantage of the fact that this ecosystem is evolving so quickly that you’re making sure that laptops are on the cutting edge of that wave of innovation—building on top of Android technologies makes that easier,” he says.
Until now, when Google releases a new set of features for Android or its Gemini companion, it often also announces some of those capabilities for other platforms, such as Wear OS smartwatchesAndroid Auto, or Google Home. Chromebooks weren’t part of that picture because they were built on a different technology stack and had their own design cycles. However, with Googlebooks, you can expect to see new Android features available on the Googlebook tablet, where it makes sense.
Case in point: Create a Widget. This is a new AI production feature coming in Android 17, allowing users to create their own widget by simply talking to Gemini. You can ask it to create a widget that shows the day’s exchange rate if you’re traveling, or a custom weather widget that also shows wind speed. This feature will too available on Googlebooks.
But the highlight feature Google is teasing out of the gate is the pointer, which the company calls the “Magic Pointer” on the Googlebook. Built by Google’s DeepMind teamScope your pointer while hovering over an app or image to get contextual suggestions. For example, you can hover over a date in an email, and Gemini will suggest setting up a calendar event. Or select two images in the Files app, wiggle, and Gemini will ask if you want to merge them.
Courtesy of Google
The Play Store is where you’ll access all your apps. But you might be surprised how Google gets around a common Chromebook limitation: In ChromeOS, you can’t download desktop-level apps like you can in Windows or macOS—you can only install Android apps from the Google Play Store or use web apps. That’s a deal breaker for people who rely on specific apps that may not have a web client or a powerful Android app.
The answer is flexible software. Google has been encouraging developers to make apps responsive to screen sizes for a few years now, and that’s now translating into encouraging app developers to make desktop versions of their Android apps for Googlebooks. But Kuscher says things will be different with the use of “restricted” Android apps on Chromebooks, which were originally designed for the web era first.
