Google has retired the Chromebook brand. Its replacement, Googlebook, went up for pre-order on 21 September starting at $899, with devices reaching shelves in the US on 4 October and in Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia a day later.

“Built on the Android technology stack and paired with desktop foundations from ChromeOS, Googlebook is designed for Gemini Intelligence and engineered to work with your Android phone right out of the box,” wrote John Solomon, Google's vice president and general manager for laptops, tablets and Android Enterprise.

The hardware is being built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo, with aluminium, magnesium alloy and carbon-fibre bodies, touchscreens up to 2.8K OLED, haptic glass trackpads and backlit keyboards. Intel and Qualcomm processors pair with dedicated NPUs rated above 45 TOPS, and Google claims up to 14 hours of battery life. The Glowbar — a light strip on the lid that shows battery charge and animates when you talk to Gemini — is back.

The pitch is phone-laptop continuity. Signing in migrates your Android phone's settings, saved passwords, Wi-Fi networks and messages, backed by end-to-end encryption. “Continue On” resumes a phone task on the laptop from the taskbar; the Files app browses phone files and photos; “Cast My Apps” streams a phone app into a desktop window.

Three Gemini features anchor the desktop. “Magic Pointer” summons Gemini to whatever is on screen when you wiggle the cursor — Google stresses it acts only when asked and can be switched off. “Rambler”, next to the Quick Insert key, turns dictated thoughts into structured notes in multiple languages, and “Create My Widget” generates desktop widgets from a plain-language description.

Google is blending the web and the Play Store: the desktop class Chrome browser with extensions alongside Android apps, plus native tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and CapCut, and a year of GeForce NOW. For developers it bundles Antigravity, Google's agent development platform, and a full terminal environment for tools like Claude Code.

Security is pitched as ChromeOS-grade, with the Titan hardware root of trust, on-device malware detection and — a first for laptops, Google says — a Level 5 security-certified pKVM hypervisor powering an isolated Linux environment. Every Googlebook includes 12 months of Google AI Pro with 5TB of storage, three months of YouTube Premium, and OS feature drops and updates for up to 10 years.

Sources