The Googlebook work test: Can an Android laptop get the job done?

In a weird way, I’ve been thinking about the idea of a Googlebook for well over a decade now — despite the fact that such a product has only officially existed for a matter of months.

I’m relatively unusual in the world of tech journalism, y’see, in that I’ve been both writing about Android and ChromeOS since the platforms’ earliest days and actively using devices from both ends of those ecosystems in my own day-to-day life that entire time. Most tech writers tend to be iPhone owners and Chromebook skeptics who see this part of the digital world from an outside view — once a year or so, when significant new devices come along for assessment — without having the perspective of someone who’s truly immersed in it day in and day out.

That distinction is always painfully apparent when you read a review that waxes on endlessly with out-of-touch iPhone comparisons and comments about the limiting nature of Google’s ChromeOS concept — positions that simply aren’t accurate for those of us who live in these ecosystems and embrace the philosophies they offer.

This won’t be one of those reviews, and I perhaps more than anyone have been champing at the bit to get my hands on one of Google’s new Android-ChromeOS-combining Googlebooks since the vaguest concept of these devices first appeared on the horizon earlier this year.

So keep that in mind when I tell you, coming from the perspective of someone who very much wanted to love this: Using a Googlebook is an extraordinarily strange experience — especially when you’re treating it like a regular laptop, as it’s being positioned by Google, and relying on it to get real work done.

But amidst all the oddness, there are some true high points along with plenty of intriguing, if unfinished-feeling, potential.

Here’s what it’s been like trying to actually work on a Googlebook — specifically, the Lenovo Googlebook, which sells for $1,149 (and was provided to me as a short-term loaner from Lenovo for the purposes of this article).

The Googlebook groundwork

First things first, let’s back up a minute and set the stage for what we’re even talking about here.

The Googlebook is a new type of laptop created by Google and built by a variety of third-party device-making partners — Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, to start.

It’s meant to represent an evolution of sorts from the Chromebook, the initially simple laptop Google launched in 2012 and slowly morphed from a barebones web portal into an “everything OS” — a system that runs web apps, Android apps, Linux apps, and even sometimes Windows apps, for businesses that have specific needs that can’t be addressed in any other way.

But while ChromeOS and Android grew closer and more connected over time, Googlebook OS — the awkwardly clunky name of the operating system at the heart of every Googlebook — sets all of that aside to aim for a fresh start. The software here sports Android at its core alongside a variety of optimizations designed to bring in bits of ChromeOS-like elements and make everything seem more suited to a laptop setting.

With that in mind, starting to use a Googlebook is both immediately familiar and vexingly confusing. The interface feels a lot like Android, which is nice, but it also doesn’t quite feel in line with how you expect to work on a desktop computer. It’s a jarring sort of mashup, and it’s tough to wrap your head around to get comfortable working.

That’s true for relatively small touches like having the clock in the upper-left corner of the screen instead of in the lower-right corner, where’d you expect it on most non-Apple-made computers. It’s a little thing, but it keeps throwing me whenever I try to glance at the time during the day. That approach is similar to Android, yes, but it just doesn’t feel right in this environment or with what pretty much all of us who’d be considering this kind of device have been trained for ages to expect with a desktop computer experience.

It’s true, too, for keyboard shortcuts, which don’t work the same as they did on ChromeOS — even just basic, common things like opening items on the taskbar. (Googlebook OS does have an impressive array of customizable keyboard shortcuts, if you find ’em, but there’s a ton of new combinations and muscle memory to be learned.)

The confusion is probably most prominent, though, on the app front, where Google is really leaning hard into the Play Store and the idea of Android apps being the primary way to get stuff done, despite the fact that Android apps often aren’t ideal — or even available, in some instances — in a productivity-oriented, desktop computing scenario.

At least one of Google’s own apps addresses this elegantly. Installing Google Calendar from the Play Store basically just gives you an app-like shell around the Calendar website, and you can use the Android app’s widget alongside that, if you want. (The downside is that you can’t use the equivalent Android app in full even if you want to, as there’s no straightforward path to install it — and, strangely, the same web-widget combo is not available with other Google apps, like Gmail or Drive, which give you only the web version and no option to use any associated Android widgets.)

And since the version of Chrome on a Googlebook looks and feels like the full desktop version of the browser — like what you’d expect on a Chromebook or any other desktop computer — relying on this unusual mix of web and Android interfaces for productivity is mostly OK. Mostly.

Working in Docs, with as few as five or six tabs open, I continue encountering an occasional issue where the tab just blanks out for a second or two and then comes back — which, suffice it to say, isn’t exactly optimal for working.

The email app I use, Superhuman, appears to be completely incompatible here. The web version (which is powered by a Chrome extension) errors out anytime I open it, and the Android app is clearly not meant for large-screen, keyboard-and-mouse use and presents an incredibly awkward experience as a result.

The productivity tool Notion, meanwhile, came up for me as one of the Googlebook’s suggested tools that’s optimized for desktop use, so I followed that direction and installed the Notion Android app — only to find that the app is much more awkward and limited on a laptop than the regular Notion web experience, where all the functions are available and the keyboard shortcuts work as expected. So I decided to try to install the Notion web app for easy ongoing access to that, and I encountered a mysterious error.

D’oh.

Then there’s something like Slack, which you can install from the Play Store but with an accurate warning that it’s “better on the website.” So, OK: You go to the website, try to sign in and install the web app version of it from there, and…there’s that blasted “cannot be installed” error again. (Google says it rolled out an update last week that allows any web page to be installed as a web app, but as of this writing — even with that update present on my device — the same error-encountering pattern persists.)

Other apps appear to work fine but then behave in odd and unexpected ways. I tried to install the Android version of Vivaldi, for instance, and it installs and opens without issue — but then returns an error anytime I try to actually open a website within it. That definitely doesn’t happen on a Chromebook, nor do the other aforementioned issues.

There’s just a lot of weird stuff like that, where it feels like a typical Google not-quite-fully-baked product. To be fair, that may be at least in part because of third-party app developers not yet supporting what needs to be supported for full optimization in this new environment — but either way, that’s the experience you get on a Googlebook right now, and it’s an all-too-familiar chicken-and-egg challenge that there’s no telling how long might take to see resolved.

On a somewhat related note: While the ability to install Linux apps is technically present on a Googlebook, it isn’t at all a user-friendly experience. Linux app installation is available only in a limited manner within the confines of a command-line terminal, and any such programs consequently don’t integrate into the launcher or the main Googlebook interface. That means there’s no real way to use them as a part of the standard Googlebook experience — which is a shame, as having those more traditional desktop apps available on ChromeOS went a long way in filling in pertinent function gaps for a lot of people and businesses. (Google says better Linux app support is vaguely “on the roadmap.”)

The various layers Google created to make Windows apps available for businesses in ChromeOS aren’t present in this environment, either. The official line, as relayed to me by a Google spokesperson, is that “Googlebook takes a fundamentally different architectural path than previous platforms” and they “aren’t attempting to patch together legacy PC software layers or rely on Windows emulation to make a laptop functional”:

Instead, Googlebook OS is built directly on the Android tech stack with the desktop foundations of ChromeOS, pairing the world’s largest native app ecosystem with an uncompromised, full desktop Chrome browser.

This makes it easier than ever for developers to build a true desktop-class app experience.

That’s all noble enough in theory — but as a prospective Googlebook owner right now, what good does any of that do when most developers haven’t yet built those “true desktop-class app experiences” for this environment? Or when you’re a business user whose company has the very same sort of “legacy” software requirements that led Google to work so hard on Windows app support for Chromebooks and maintain that option in that arena?

Pros, cons, and more Googlebook confusion

Let’s break from the strange stuff for a minute to focus on some positives — because, again, there is something undeniably cool about experiencing Android in a laptop form and seeing all the ways a Googlebook works hand in hand with an Android phone to make life easier.

First and foremost, Googlebooks stray from the longstanding minimalist Chromebook standard to give you a fully customizable desktop — with the ability to create any arrangement of shortcuts and widgets, just like you can on an Android home screen. That is absolutely a welcome progression from the more limiting ChromeOS approach and something I’d long hoped to see in that domain, and having those familiar forms of interactive info right in front of you while working is an incredibly helpful addition.

Being able to easily access the files on your phone without any extra hoop-jumping is also a nifty touch, for the moments when such a need arises. Once your Googlebook is paired with your Android phone, you simply open the Files app on the laptop, and you can see and interact with any files on your phone right then and there. (That said, the Files app is otherwise much more barebones and limited than its ChromeOS equivalent, unfortunately — so you can’t, for instance, drag and drop directly from the phone to any specific folder on your local or Google Drive storage.)

As far as hardware is concerned, Lenovo did a bang-up job with its inaugural Googlebook device. This is one seriously nice laptop — a pleasure to hold, with an almost silky-feeling smooth texture on the top and a thoughtfully ridged bottom for extra grippiness when you carry it. The system has a beautiful (and big!) 15.3″ display, an excellent keyboard and trackpad, and surprisingly great speakers. Those boxes are all checked off.

But it’s the experience inside the hardware that means the most, here in particular — so, back to that:

Native app installation aside, one key selling point of the Googlebook is how it’s able to stream apps from a connected Android phone — letting you run an app from your phone on the computer, in other words, without having the app installed locally on the Googlebook itself.

It’s a slightly confusing concept to wrap your head around, especially since you can also install most of the same apps from your phone directly onto the Googlebook if you want (and, given that this is a native Android device, installing and running Android apps on it is absolutely smoother and snappier than what you typically experience on a Chromebook). Because of that — just like with the equivalent streaming option that had been available on ChromeOS in recent years — it seems like something that’s bound to be more befuddling than beneficial for most people, most of the time.

That being said, I have had a couple of situations come up where it seemed like the feature might be handy. First, I needed to get a two-factor authentication code out of Authy, which is available only as a mobile app. A perfect use-case, right?

Well, not exactly: The Googlebook wouldn’t let me stream the Authy app from my phone and instead gave me an error: “Can’t cast content. This content is restricted.” So then I thought maybe I’d just install Authy directly onto the Googlebook instead, but alas: The app “isn’t available on Google Play on this device.” Bah.

Another time, I tried to open Google Wallet from my phone to get some info off my insurance card, which I have stored in that service. That worked, at first — but then the app kept hanging on a loading screen anytime I tried to open anything.

The one scenario where the app streaming has been helpful is with notifications: Anytime you get a new notification on your connected Android phone, it shows up as a pop-up in the upper-right corner of the Googlebook display. The same actions that’d be present on the notification on your phone, such as marking something as read or replying in-line, are also present on the computer, and you can click on the notification to open the associated app in full on your laptop — just like you would on your phone, only everything happens within a window on the Googlebook.

That’s a clever little sleeper feature and arguably the best part of the app streaming capability, even if you don’t necessarily think about the fact that you’re using app streaming when it happens.

Another key selling point is the addition of AI-oriented features into the Googlebook operating system. This includes a Magic Pointer feature that lets you wiggle your cursor to summon Gemini and ask it about any specific area of text or visual on your screen — which is fine but not something I find myself actually using often. Its most useful-seeming promise is being able to act on information, like creating a calendar event based on a specific area of an email or text message on your screen, but its accuracy in getting the details right in such scenarios has been pretty hit and miss in my experience.

Then there’s the integrated Rambler system for conversational voice-to-text conversion (as seen on Google’s recent Pixel phones). It works well, but by design it isn’t a direct dictation tool; instead, it adjusts and rewrites your rambling speech (hence the name) to make it better, in its view. That makes a lot of sense when you’re spouting off a quick text message while walking or driving, but unless you don’t mind losing your own specific style, intentions, and voice with longer computer-crafted communications, it doesn’t seem like something you’d be using much in a business capacity — though it can certainly be handy to have available on occasion.

As is often the case with Google products and AI features in particular, some of the smaller, less headline-making touches on the Googlebook are much more interesting than the flashy marquee features.

All in all, it’s a perplexing picture.

The Googlebook productivity puzzle

More than anything, the question that keeps coming to my mind — again, as someone who fully embraces Android and frequently works on a Chromebook — is simply: Who is this meant to serve? And, in its current state, for whom will it be a meaningful upgrade and enticement over other existing options?

I keep thinking how this exact setup would make for an absolutely brilliant souped-up Android tablet interface, with the right kind of hardware around it. You’d have the familiar Android-like environment, optimized for a larger screen, and the ability to pair that with a more desktop-like experience in the core Google apps — including Chrome, for a less limiting active web experience when you connect a keyboard (or flip around a convertible device to have one present).

As the Googlebook stands now, though, I just don’t know that it’s a great replacement yet for a Chromebook — or any other laptop — particularly when it comes to getting actual work done. At best, it feels like a fairly linear progression with some awkward adjustments and asterisks. At worst, it’s gonna be a real challenge for some people to use in the way they need a laptop to work. And I’m just not sure what’s being added, from a practical perspective, that makes it all worthwhile.

What we can say is that Google has a history of launching products that are still rough around with the edges, and sometimes, those products evolve over time — sometimes quite quickly! — and end up becoming incredible. Heck, think how much ChromeOS changed from its earliest form to the way it is today.

At the same time, Google also has a pesky habit of pivoting, giving up, and failing to follow through on once-heavily-hyped products. A fair amount of the Googlebook’s early shortcomings come down to convincing third-party developers to buy into the platform and invest the resources in making their apps work well on it, too — which is the exact same chicken-and-egg challenge that’s kept promising Google concepts from blossoming before.

For now, the Googlebook is an awkward start with plenty of potential. Where it goes next is anyone’s guess — and something that, to some degree, may depend on how many people are willing to take the leap with it early and wait for it to evolve.