Googlebooks are the "new category" of laptops designed to provide Android users with the same seamless bridge from mobile to desktop that iPhone users enjoy with MacBook. After being announced earlier this year at the Android Show, the first devices in this new category are now available to pre-order.
Five different Googlebooks are available today, from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo, starting at $899 (with a year's subscription to Google AI Pro thrown in) and each one is built with premium materials like aluminum, magnesium alloy and carbon fiber. They all feature a responsive touchscreen, large trackpad and backlit keyboard. These laptops come with either Intel or Qualcomm processors under the hood and offer up to 14 hours of battery life.
Although Google has made sure certain rules are followed, each of the Googlebooks launching today offer slightly different features to cater to different tastes. Standouts include the Asus Googlebook 14, which weighs just 2.2 pounds and boasts an anti-glare screen with 16 hours of battery life. Acer offers a neat convertible model, while Lenovo is bringing a 15-inch option with a soft-touch finish in Pantone’s Cloud Dancer.
Quick links
- Acer Googlebook 14: $899 @ Best Buy
- Dell XPS Googlebook: $999 @ Best Buy
- Lenovo Googlebook 15: $1,099 @ Best Buy
- Asus Googlebook 14: $1,299 @ Best Buy
- HP Googlebook 14: $1,299 @ Best Buy
Googlebooks: Price and release
Pre-orders are now open on the Google Store, Best Buy, and other select retailers.
Starting at $899, every Googlebook includes 12 months of Google AI Pro providing 5TB of cloud storage and Gemini Advanced tools, plus three months of YouTube Premium, Adobe Photoshop, and CapCut.
Google has also confirmed that Googlebook OS will come with regular feature drops and updates for up to 10 years.
Devices arrive on shelves starting October 4 in the U.S., and October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia.
Apple-like interoperability
These days, most of us switch between doing tasks across our phones and laptops—which is something Googlebooks want to make easier. For example, if you start an email or project on your phone while you’re on the road, Googlebook’s Continue On feature lets you pick up right where you left off from the desktop taskbar.
The same seamlessness applies to your media. When you take a picture or download a document on your phone, you won’t have to email it to yourself or hunt through third-party apps. Thanks to the updated Files app, your phone’s photos and downloads show up in your laptop’s file menu almost like magic.
Setting up a Googlebook is also pain-free, as signing in automatically transfers your phone’s settings, saved passwords, Wi-Fi networks, and messages over with end-to-end encryption. And if you need to quickly grab a two-factor code or order food from a delivery app, Cast My Apps lets you stream and interact with your phone’s apps in a desktop window without breaking your workflow.
Magic Pointer, Rambler, and custom widgets
Google is betting heavily on desktop AI features to justify the launch, and a few of them sound genuinely useful:
- Magic Pointer: Shake or wiggle your mouse cursor while hovering over content on your screen to bring Gemini right to whatever you're looking at. You can ask it to summarize text, translate foreign languages, or organize a messy calendar without juggling multiple tabs. Crucially, Gemini only acts when you ask it to, and you can toggle the feature off entirely if you prefer a standard pointer.
- Rambler: Located right next to the Quick Insert key, Rambler acts as an upgraded speech-to-text tool. You can talk through random notes, action items, or a stream-of-consciousness thought (even switching between languages mid-sentence), and Rambler cleans up the filler words and formats everything into neat headers, checklists, and takeaways.
- Create My Widget: Instead of hunting through app menus, you can describe what you need in plain language to generate custom interactive desktop widgets that track weather, schedules, or stocks in real time. While this isn’t exactly vibe coding, it leads to similar results.
- Quick Insert Key: A dedicated physical key lets you instantly pull up emojis, clipboard items, or recent files. However, I’m still not entirely sold on the fact that it takes over the traditional Caps Lock key real estate.
Google is also bringing back a familiar hardware touch: the Glowbar. Positioned on the exterior lid, this light bar sweeps across to indicate battery levels, lights up on startup, and displays playful light animations whenever you interact with Gemini. It’s a neat way to denote these new laptops as Googlebooks.
App support, gaming, and power-user tools
Android apps on desktop displays haven't always offered the best user experience, but Google claims it is heavily optimizing millions of Play Store apps specifically for large screens, mouse, and keyboard input, with clear optimization labels right in the store interface.
You get full desktop Chrome with extension support, alongside native creative applications like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, and CapCut. Streaming apps like Netflix and HBO Max are supported out of the box with offline viewing capabilities. For gamers, Googlebooks run native mobile titles alongside a bundled 1-year subscription to GeForce Now for streaming AAA PC games.
For developers and power users, Google built in a Level 5 security-certified pKVM hypervisor. This powers an isolated Linux environment with full terminal access to run tools like Claude Code or Antigravity CLI. It also includes Antigravity, Google’s agent development platform, letting developers build, test, and deploy AI agents locally on the machine.
Googlebooks: Outlook
To sweeten the deal on those price tags, Google is bundling 12 months of Google AI Pro (which includes 5TB of cloud storage and Gemini Advanced), 3 months of YouTube Premium, and promises up to 10 years of software updates and feature drops.
I don’t know yet if Googlebooks are going to convince traditional Windows or MacBook users to switch, but the tight Android phone integration, high-end hardware specs, and practical AI tools make this one of the more interesting hardware shifts we've seen from Google in a while. We look forward to putting these through our full suite of lab tests soon.
Would you buy a Googlebook, or are you sticking with your current setup? Let us know in the comments.
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