Googlebook looks promising, but one big laptop brand is conspicuously absent

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ZDNET's key takeaways

The new Googlebook looks promising, but questions remain to justify their cost.

Chromebooks had a clearly defined use case that reflected a real consumer need.

The brand I most expected to see was absent from Google's announcement.

Google just announced a new product line: the Googlebook, marketed as the successor to the Chromebook with more capable hardware and a compelling promise: the merging of Android and ChromeOS into something better.

This as-yet unnamed operating system has been cited as "AluminumOS" through various leaks, but has not yet been officially announced by Google. Details on the devices themselves are also sparse, but Google says they will be a more premium product with higher-end hardware.

Also: First look at Googlebook: A premium Chromebook alternative for Android users

So far, Google has shown off a limited set of features, but one of the primary is a re-imagining of the mouse cursor. On the Googlebook, wiggling it opens up contextual menus on whatever's on your screen powered by Gemini Intelligence, the on-device AI.

Another feature we saw is the ability to use apps from your Android smartphone directly on the Googlebook with no additional downloads required. In the demo, it showed the user opening Duolingo in a window that looked a lot like MacOS' Phone Mirroring. This is ostensibly the tip of the iceberg when it comes to deeper integration between the smartphone and Googlebook; but if that's the case, I have one big question.

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