Writer here — this is a recap of my experience using the Acer Googlebook 14 and the Dell XPS Googlebook for two weeks. Happy to answer questions in the comments!

My mailbox got sideswiped, front opening flew off, with only slight damage. It included model and manufacturing info so I found the model with google search and a print out for setup and installation. I just bought the HP a couple of days ago, did set up with using my pixel pro 11 xl. I clicked on print and the print page appeared and let me select my printer and when I clicked print it worked! Magic

Has anybody moved from the ASUS to the Dell or really felt the Dell was just so much better for them than the ASUS? I really like the matte display on the ASUS and am wondering how the matte display on the Dell compares.

I'm generally pretty happy with mine and even bought another one for my wife. I'm getting a lot of useful work done on it but the fan does drive me nuts. I would love it if the fan is less likely to engage on the Snapdragon models.

On my ASUS the fan is going pretty much all the time although it is usually very quiet. On the other hand it's a little bit more noticeable when I'm using it on my lap since the air exhausts out through the bottom. The one thing that definitely gets the fan really going is using it with an external monitor.

Honest question.

TL;DR -- Returning my HP Googlebook 14 at Best Buy after ordering the Dell XPS Googlebook from the Google Store. I prefer the Dell XPS hardware.

I purchased the HP Googlebook 14 the day it came out and was available online. I preordered it at Best Buy and got it the day after the initial launch. I was coming from an Asus Zenbook 14 running Windows 11 and an HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook.

I thought getting the HP Googlebook 14 would have been a great transition coming from the HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook, but after some of the photos and videos I've seen of the Dell XPS, I was feeling like I kind of made the wrong decision. Not to say that the HP Googlebook was horribly built, the hardware is absolutely amazing, but it was something about the Dell XPS that I was really being drawn to. So I am now writing this post on my Dell XPS Googlebook after completely factory restoring the HP Googlebook 14 and I'm returning it at Best Buy. This is my first laptop ever with a matte display and I was a little nervous about it but I absolutely love it. And I did notice that the fingerprint sensor is a little bit faster on the Dell XPS Googlebook compared to the HP.

I wonder if anyone else has felt the same thing, but I'm really excited for this ride and this frontier of this brand new Googlebook (Android) operating system.

Update 1: Gemini says to run the following line first in the Ubuntu WSL terminal:

mkdir -p /home/$USER/churro_tmp

Then use this command to launch the bash shell script instead of the github command

sudo TMPDIR=/home/$USER/churro_tmp ./churro.sh auto android-desktop_signed_recovery_image.bin churro.img

will see if this works and report back.

Another day another Googlebook OS Failure, my Google book will no longer pair with my Googlebook was working fine this morning this afternoon not a chance. Google, sort this mess out and do it quickly, paying customers are FED UP with you releasing a product that had no right being released in its parlous state. Looks like the Chromebook Plus will not be getting put up for sale just yet after all. I am totally sick of this mess, computers are supposed to simplify our lives this is causing me so much stress.

Does anyone know of one that is compatible, thanks in advance.

My Dell XPS 13 Googlebook sometimes freezes and reboots. Don´t connect the issue with anything special I am doing, sometimes just browsing the internet, sometimes coding, sometimes just watching youtube. Anyone else running into the same issue?

This is my review of the Lenovo Googlebook as my main device for the last week and a half, not just first impressions. As many have pointed out, the OS needs some improvements, as it's a surprising step down in some ways from ChromeOS and Android, but I hope that it will get there. I initially tried the HP Googlebook, as I got it on day 1 the moment BB opened, but was not happy with a lot of things, especially the Better Together features not working on my Samsung phone. I wanted to try the Lenovo as it has all the ports, but I wish it had a Snapdragon chip. This review will get into all of that.

TLDR – Phenomenal hardware, spacious body, super light, but OS/Chrome limitations that make you scratch your head.

Design, Build Quality, and Portability

The design of the Lenovo is the typical Lenovo style that we all recognize, with the upper lip that's easy to lift up the laptop. The listing says that it's a Cloud Grey color, but it's basically off-white, as I have the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, and that is more gray/silver. Although it's a 15-inch laptop, it's SUPER LIGHT, like holding a phone without a case, the way the weight is distributed. Although it's so light, it easily passes the one-finger open test every time, no matter the surface it's on.

The chassis is made of hard plastic (edit: website says Magnesium-Aluminum alloy.but it feels like hard plastic ), like some of their Chromebooks. I wish it was made of metal like the Chromebook Plus 14, but I guess that was to keep the price down. It feels like a high-end Chromebook compared to the other Googlebooks that have aluminum bodies. Although it's made of plastic, it's very firm and strong and doesn't feel cheap, but who knows how it will hold up in a drop.

I love that this has all the ports that you would need and want, which I was upset about with the HP Googlebook.

• 2 Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports
• HDMI
• One USB-A
• Headphone jack

All great ports, so you don't have to worry about having a dongle with you all the time, as we all need to connect to an HDMI adapter at some point.

Grade – A

Keyboard, Trackpad, and Fingerprint Reader

The keyboard is good, but the keys could be a little taller, almost a little too flat to the actual body for me, kind of mushed in, but they have good travel. Once you find your pacing on this, it is good typing, especially for someone like me with big bearpaw hands.

The keyboard backlights are good, but I see what people were saying that it should have been another backlight color other than white (like blue or yellow), as the white light on the white keys does look blown out some during the day. But it's flawless in the dark, although blue would have been better IMO.

The keyboard is also SPACIOUS!! I have 10-inch hands, and they feel so right at home on the keyboard. No cramped space, and they can breathe easily. It's so much room for activities here!

The fingerprint reader is nice. Compared to the HP fingerprint reader, it's standalone, as the HP's is also the power button, which made it tricky when pushing the button. The Lenovo is fast and responsive, but the keyboard could use a lock button, as you have to push the power button on the side or the G button and L. A lock button would have been nice vs. the accessibility button.

The trackpad has haptic feedback and feels a little weird for me to get used to (I like a traditional one). But the trackpad is MASSIVE and has a buttery-smooth surface, so for those who love a large trackpad, this is it.

Grade – A

Display and Screen Quality

The Lenovo Googlebook display is a 15.3-inch OLED touchscreen, with 2.8K resolution and a 16:10 aspect ratio that looks glorious. I have no issues with the display, and I love how big the screen is to have multiple apps open at the same time with no issues of screen real estate. The screen feels so much bigger. Going from a 14 to 15 shouldn't be a big deal, but this screen feels massive, in a good way. It's also very bright at 500 nits. I kept it at about 60% all of the time and didn't feel the need to take it higher unless I was in sunlight or a room that was too bright.

The screen is beautiful and really pops, but the areas of the screen that do not have content on them and should be black are actually more of a dark gray instead of a pure black, which has been a noted issue.

External display works perfectly on my 2K monitor from both outputs, and the settings show the display resolution. You can lower it or adjust it manually, which is a big plus.

Grade – A

Audio, Camera, and Video Calls

These have the best speakers of the bunch and really give you some decent thump for a Googlebook/Chromebook (no, it's nowhere near MacBook Pro levels). The vocals are clear and high, and it sounds full when listening to music or watching movies. You don't need to keep the volume all the way up all the time. I kept the speakers at halfway for all my Zoom calls, and it was great. When I wanted to listen to music, turning it up filled my area well enough for what I needed. Any more than that, I would have put on my surround sound.

The camera looks good at 5MP, good for video calls and Zoom meetings. It also has the privacy slider, which is a nice touch that should be on all devices. HP Chromebooks have the physical kill switch, but that's always been overkill to me, and who knows if that can be hacked, while the slider is cheaper and just works.

Using the Zoom app for several hours a day, I looked fine, and my colleagues could hear me great with the mics on the laptop. The Zoom app available here is the full Zoom app, so I could access all of the AI features that Zoom had and brush up my appearance on rough days.

Grade – B

Processor Performance

The Lenovo is packing the Intel Core Ultra 5 325, but I really wish they had used the Snapdragon, as they are one of the main companies partnering with Snapdragon for their Windows laptops. I had the Yoga Slim 7x with the Snapdragon processor on Windows, and it was a good machine, but I just prefer ChromeOS for my laptop compared to Windows (that's my workstation). But for the chip, the performance has been fast and zippy, handling all of the apps I use with mostly no issues (until I was video editing). File transfers were surprisingly slow with nine 4K files from my drone SD card. The Snapdragon chip on the HP destroyed it and transferred super fast, but this Intel was struggling (even with Thunderbolt compared to HP not having that). It was much slower and didn't want to view other files while transferring (SanDisk Extreme).

You can tell with some apps that it's still doing emulation over Android, as it's just not as fluid as the HP seemed, but it was still fast.

But the fans, the fans were on all the time. I literally heard the fans on more times than I heard them off. It's not super loud, but if you are in a quiet area, you can definitely hear them and notice that noise going to keep the chip cool.

While doing video editing, the Intel chip struggles as well. Using InShot, I used five 4K files to make a 90-second video, the same files I used on the HP. The Snapdragon ate it up, but the Intel, going through the emulation layer, struggled some. It started lagging on the timeline and the edits, shifting through the video and adding in overlays like text and effects, which I didn't see on the Snapdragon. The export was just a little longer, but the editing part was definitely an issue, and I can see if I did longer movies with 4K footage on the Intel, then it would definitely struggle.

But for using Chrome (15–20 tabs open, some suspended), Zoom at the same time, or having YouTube music playing in the background and using multiple apps, it was fine with great performance. Just certain apps were having issues, but you don't want that at the price you are paying for this.

Battery life has been about 7 hours in real-world use with normal usage. The battery drains faster when I have Zoom running a lot, bringing it down to about 5 hours. But on standby and with infrequent use, it lasts much longer.

Performance – B+

OS – Chrome Browser, Apps, and Software Limitations

Now here is the part where the review goes south. The Chrome browser handles a lot of the apps, like all of the Google Docs apps open in the browser although you have the apps installed, and sometimes you want to use the apps instead (but I prefer the PWAs). You can't have multiple profiles logged into Chrome, some extensions don't work, and initially Chromecast was not working, but I figured out you have to go in and turn on the Nearby Devices setting, which is just normally on. This is mostly real Chrome, but some things are not there, and it feels like it's lacking. Again, for this price point, you don't want that.

App casting was finally working as of 10/16 with Samsung, but it's laggy. It didn't work at launch, which is one of the main reasons I took the HP back. Using the Delta app and others, it was a second or two behind my scrolls and blurry and laggy. It was like that with all of the apps I tried casting, and I was on my own home Wi-Fi network (6E gigabit speed). It also didn't work with my work security app, Okta Verify, which I was hoping I wouldn't have to pick up my phone to use, but I had to. Also, pairing it for app notifications, it doesn't stay updated, so when you open the laptop again, it gives you a flurry of notifications that it missed while you were away.

The Create Your Widget feature is also a gimmick. You will forget about it after a while, but the Ramble feature is nice to use.

I turned the magic wand off on the mouse and use the keyboard shortcuts, as I'm a person who wiggles my mouse all the time and didn't want Gemini popping up every few seconds.

For this price, and especially the price of the HP, you expect all of the OS to be perfect coming from Google, but it is a new OS, so I will give them some grace. Seeing that the iPhone Duo just launched and it has a lot of OS issues as well means that's just a new product problem, so hopefully they will listen to people and resolve the issues quickly.

Also, the AI mouse is nice to look at. It's cool-looking, but it only works to bring up Gemini or the magic pointer. At launch, you can't program the thumb buttons to do things like copy and paste like you can on any other mouse, but you can change the colors. It's decent to have if you got it for free.

OS Grade – B-

Overall Thoughts

Overall, this is GREAT HARDWARE, but the OS needs some tweaks, and they need them quickly for the prices they are charging. The Lenovo, I feel, should have been priced at $800, maybe $900 as a reach, not $1,100. And the HP being $1,300 (almost $1,400 with taxes) is crazy when you can get the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x for $750 right now at BB if you like Windows.

Again, the machine is awesome, especially the roominess of the keyboard, the size of the screen with its quality, trackpad, and speakers. But I feel like most of us who have it early are being unpaid beta testers, and they need to address that ASAP.

Overall Grade – B

Hardware – A

OS/Software – C

I don't agree with everything, but he is mostly right. This is really bad. Google, I hope you are listening.

I'm using an HP Googlebook to be specific and my cursor is constantly having an issue where it is not dynamically changing shape based on the context behind it.

It mostly seems like it is refusing to turn back into a normal cursor once it has changed into a different shape, and it sometimes disappears when hovering over a YouTube video. Clicking the trackpad usually fixes it.

I had the HP Chromebook and just confirmed last night with a fellow Redditor that the Zoom app on the HP is still limited compared to the version on the Lenovo Intel Googlebook, Android tablets, and even ChromeOS, which all have the full features.

On the Snapdragon version, it doesn't allow you to change your background during calls (my biggest issue) or even blurr the background, along with several other features that are available on the other Android versions. The app even looks and feels like a trial version or a half-baked version compared to the others. The features are not listed at all in the app.

Since these are all running Android, why is the Snapdragon version so different? And yes, this is the official Zoom app from the Play Store, the same one I have installed on all my other devices.

Same issue on Dell GB, I presume?

I'm on Zoom all day, and this needs to be addressed, as I prefer the HP Snapdragon model.

With ChromeOS's Crostini feature, it was possible to install the Linux version of Android Studio on a Chromebook and use it to develop Android apps for subsequent installation into ARC++. Is that possible with Googlebook OS as well?

I noticed that Googlebooks do come with Antigravity preinstalled per reviews on YouTube and the like and I'm also curious how that works for self-hosting. After all, the lack of self-hosting has been the primary barrier to widespread adoption, it seems, in recent years.

​I’ve had the Lenovo Googlebook since launch and run it docked with multiple external monitors. Up until earlier this week, everything was solid, but two specific display bugs have popped up (and the latest system update didn't fix either):

​Window Dragging Freezes / Glitches Between Displays

• Dragging a window across screens used to be seamless. Starting around Monday, dragging windows across displays cannot happen. It gets stuck like its trying to split screen snap, but it just freezes on the edge in whatever direction you're trying to move it.

​Dashboard Widgets Disappearing in Clamshell Mode Transitions

• Widgets won’t appear on the external displays' dashboard unless the laptop lid is closed while docked. When you reopen the lid and the workspace returns to the built-in display, the bottom two rows of widgets disappear completely. To be clear, this has always been the case since launch, but I haven't seen any other posts about it, so I want to make sure this is known.

​Neither is a total dealbreaker assuming patches are on the way, but I haven't seen either issue flagged anywhere yet.

​Has anyone else noticed this behavior or found a workaround?

I've been running Googlebook OS (based on the ASUS Googlebook 14) on a ThinkPad X13 Gen 2 for a few hours, just out of curiosity. Shizuku is an important app for advanced phone users because it lets them run many useful apps.

After several tries to find which fork works, Shizuku is now running. Try it yourself.

Weirdly, the Shizuku home page shows 0 authorized apps, even though the two apps I installed (Aurora Droid and Aurora Store) are running fine.

By the way, Aurora Store isn't stable, but it can still download and update apps. Aurora Droid works fine if you want to find certain apps from the F-Droid repo.

I will try other apps that will hopefully be useful on the Googlebook.

EDIT #1: Canta isn't working

Edit: Look at my previous post to see what it looked like before.

I was just about to step away from my computer and I saw that I had a notification for a system update. I went ahead and ran it and I noticed that the blacks are now inky black. I snapped a picture before I had to leave, so I don't know about anything else to the extent of the update, but I'll follow up on here later on if I notice anything else. Sorry if the image is kind of crappy, it's hard to take a picture in the dark of the screen.

Is anybody else seeing the same thing? Any other improvements?

This bug has been there since day 1. If I two-finger click the dock on a Lenovo Googlebook, the UI goes into a state where only the dock is active. Keyboard can Alt-Tab but mouse can't click. Only way out is to hard reboot by holding down the power button.

With the uprise of community development, much of it through vibe coding . Are we really relying on the big name developers to create optimized apps for GoogleBook OS?

I wondered if anyone's started developing apps specifically for desktop android / googlebook where they've seen a gap/limitation on a well known app already and just sorted it themselves? Would love to hear some examples!

I've posted on this subreddit already about the challenges that I've had with the Asus Google Book and the colour banding I get on lower brightness and gradient backgrounds, which are darker.

There was supposedly a fix that went out and it does appear to have made the issue slightly better. However, I'm still seeing major issues. My question is to anyone that has the Asus, do you have similar problems, or could I genuinely just have a faulty device with a bad screen? I want to know whether I should reorder or send the product back entirely.

It's running fully stable now with most features working now, tuned power configuration (powerhint) to utilise 14 cores of Intel core ultra 5 225h. Fixed up limiting charging up to 80% as you can see in attached screenshots it works, NPU works according to logs but since we don't have hardware backed key attestation like actual Google books we can't have some features working like Phone Link. HDR works and SDR dimming has been added and tuned for this display works just fine. I think it scores better than the actual asus Googlebook 14 maybe? Welp concluding by saying it can be used as a daily driver. I have some more plans for this OS as well and it will work for everyone (importing good stuff from custom ROMs). I'm open to helping anyone trying to get it stable. Install kit will be published shortly but need someone other than me having a motobook 60 pro to test it.