Well, hell’s bells: It’s finally happening.
After years of misguided rumors and off-base expectations — over a decade’s worth, even! — Google is actually now on the brink of combining Android and ChromeOS into a single superpowered platform for laptops and mobile devices alike.
The company officially announced the advent of an entirely new type of product called the Googlebook as part of its pre-Google-I/O “Android Show” event on Tuesday. According to Google, the Googlebook is “a new category of laptops” that brings together Chrome, the Google Play ecosystem of apps, and “a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence” (a fancy way to say “there’ll be lots of Gemini AI this-and-thats”).
At their core, Googlebooks appear to sport an interface that’s somewhere between Android as we know it and ChromeOS — with echoes of the 2010-era large-screen-optimized Android 3.0 Honeycomb era — to create what Google seemingly now sees as the future of the laptop experience.
In a lot of ways, Googlebooks seem poised to pick up right where ChromeOS left off — like, for instance, with how they make it easy to both natively install Android apps and stream apps directly from your phone on the computer. They also feature a nifty-sounding new Quick Access system that lets you seamlessly search, view, and work with files from your phone right on the laptop, without even having to do any sharing or transferring.
