A year after Google said Android was coming to laptops, the laptops have names. On Monday 21 September Google opened pre-orders for Googlebook, a new category of premium notebooks built on Android with the desktop foundations of ChromeOS, "designed for Gemini Intelligence" and made by five partners: Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo. Prices start at $899. The first machines reach shops on 4 October in the United States and a day later in Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia. "Googlebook" was the most-searched technology term in the world on Tuesday 22 September; in India alone Google Trends counted more than 5,000 searches an hour for "Gemini" on the back of it.
The hardware
Google is selling these as flagship machines, not the cheap Chromebooks schools buy by the pallet. Every Googlebook uses aluminium, magnesium alloy or carbon fibre, has a touchscreen of up to 2.8K OLED, a haptic glass trackpad and a backlit keyboard, and runs on top-end Intel Core Ultra or Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips with neural processors rated above 45 TOPS for on-device AI. Google claims up to 14 hours of battery. Dell's version carries the XPS name. The Glowbar, a light strip on the lid from the old Pixelbook, is back: it sweeps to show battery level and animates when you talk to Gemini.
What makes it an Android laptop
The pitch is that your phone and laptop stop being strangers. Sign in and the phone's settings, saved passwords, Wi-Fi networks and messages move across, end-to-end encrypted. Continue On picks up a task from the phone on the laptop taskbar; the Files app searches the phone's photos and documents without cables; Cast My Apps streams any phone app into a desktop window, so a one-time code from Messages or a food-delivery order does not mean reaching for the phone. You get desktop Chrome with extensions plus the Play Store's Android apps, including Photoshop, Lightroom and CapCut, Netflix and HBO Max with offline viewing, and a year of GeForce NOW for games.
Three Gemini features are the headline. Magic Pointer: wiggle the cursor and Gemini acts on whatever is on screen, translating text or tidying a calendar; it works only when asked and can be switched off. Rambler, a key beside Quick Insert, turns rambling speech, in several languages, into structured notes with headers and checklists. Create My Widget builds a desktop widget from a plain-language description.
For developers
This is the part that separates Googlebook from a Chromebook. It ships with Antigravity, Google's AI-agent development platform, and a full Linux terminal inside a "Level 5 security-certified" pKVM hypervisor, isolated from the rest of the system, so tools like Claude Code or the Antigravity CLI can run autonomous coding agents without touching your personal data. Security is ChromeOS's: a Titan hardware root of trust, layered defences and on-device malware detection. Google promises feature drops and updates for up to ten years. The $899 includes twelve months of Google AI Pro (5 TB of storage and Gemini Advanced) and three months of YouTube Premium and Photoshop.
Will Bangladesh see one?
Not officially, and not soon. Bangladesh is not in the launch list, Google has no retail presence here, and at $899 plus duty a Googlebook would land in Multiplan Centre at well over Tk 1.2 lakh, MacBook Air money, for a machine whose software has never been sold in this market. Chromebooks never took off in Bangladesh because the country runs on Windows; the difference this time is that the Play Store is the app store every Bangladeshi already uses, and the phone-first design fits a country where the phone is the main computer. Expect grey-market units from Singapore and Dubai within weeks of 4 October, and watch how updates behave on a device Google has not certified for this region. Our September 2025 report on Google's announcement of Android for PCs has the background.
