The case for a full-circle Googlebook future
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Summary
Put on your finest propeller-packin’ thinking caps, my fellow Android-appreciating animals — ’cause I’ve got a brain-bending bit of big-picture thinking about the future of Android and everything around it. This pondering comes out of my ongoing time living with one of Google’s new Googlebook laptops — the beautifully built Lenovo Googlebook (provided to me as a short-term loaner for editorial assessment). Right now, the Googlebook experience itself is best summed up as an awkward start with plenty of potential. Android in a laptop environment just comes with an awful lot of asterisks, especially when you’re trying to use such a system for serious work. In many ways, it feels like a step down from the more polished and productivity-optimized Chromebook setup it’s ultimately designed to replace. But while working on a Googlebook and using it as your primary computer still seems like a bit of a square-peg situation, I’ve been struck by one area where the Googlebook OS software at the center of the experience feels almost shockingly natural. And that’s led me down a rabbit hole of pondering about the bigger-picture implications of this operating system and how it could, at least in theory, one day affect the rest of the Android ecosystem. Lemme explain. [Get original Googley insight in your inbox with my free Android Intelligence newsletter — one new thing to try every Friday.] A Googlebook by any other name So, at its core, Googlebook OS is essentially Android — right? The software that powers Googlebooks is a specialized version of Android 17 designed to have some ChromeOS-like elements along with phone-connecting powers and a handful of feature additions that help it work better on a big screen. And the more I use it, the more I keep coming back to a thought that I mentioned in passing in my initial Googlebook analysis — that this is what the Android tablet interface oughta be. Think about it: Google has never really figured out how it wants an Android tablet to work — or if and how it even wants to promote and support the development of that not-quite-a-phone, not-quite-a-laptop form factor in the first place. Early on, we saw a completely large-screen-optimized Android version called Honeycomb (a.k.a. Android 3.0 through 3.2) , where Google gave us a dramatically reimagined interface designed to take full advantage of the tablet’s added screen space. width="850" height="534" sizes="auto, (max-width: 850px) 100vw, 850px"> Android’s Honeycomb version featured an interface optimized for tablets — not so different in concept from Googlebook OS today. JR Raphael, Foundry It wasn’t long, of course, before Google did its Google Thang™ and gave up on that idea — and that’s to say nothing of the even more ambitious Android tablet plan the company spent millions of dollars to develop and then never brought to fruition at all . By a certain point, it became obvious that Google was for all practical purposes giving up on Android tablets and that touch-oriented Chromebooks were effectively filling that role for informed buyers . Fast-forward through a few other confusing short-lived pivots — the very brief return to tablet devotion with the ChromeOS-running Pixel Slate , the declaration of being done with tablets that followed, and the about-face and (once more) brief return to tablet devotion with the Pixel Tablet and its admirable but never fully realized and rapidly abandoned tablet-smart-display combo philosophy — and we’re back to a present now where Android tablets are mostly an afterthought, as far as Google and the underlying platform are concerned. With all of that in mind, using a Googlebook is a bit of a revelation — when you think about the experience as less of a full-fledged laptop replacement and more of a potential future for a revamped Android tablet. The Googlebook-Android tablet connection Consider: In many ways, Googlebook OS picks up where Honeycomb left off 15 years ago — as far as the interface itself is concerned. It feels like a familiar Android environment, for anyone who’s used Android on a phone, but with some thoughtful touches that make it more sensible in that larger-screen setting. Everything from having the clock in the upper-left corner alongside a split-apart notification panel and Quick Settings area in the right to having the same desktop-style taskbar we’ve seen on recent Android foldables just feels right when you frame a Googlebook as a tablet and not, first and foremost, a work laptop. width="1024" height="640" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px"> The Googlebook desktop feels like a natural Android tablet interface. JR Raphael / Foundry Plain and simple, it’s Android — only optimized for a larger screen. And, thanks to its ChromeOS-inspired elements, it adds in the advantages of a less restrictive big-screen browser environment and smarter tools for interacting with your phone. The elements that feel awkward for a work laptop don’t matter as much in an Android tablet, which you’re more likely to use as a touch-centric supplement and companion to your workday computer and as a device where productivity is more of an occasional add-on as opposed to the primary purpose. As a tablet interface, Googlebook OS gives you a souped-up version of the standard Android tablet setup that’d also be much more useful than a traditional tablet when you connect a keyboard. And without the expectation of it completely replacing your computer, it suddenly makes a lot of sense. So riddle me this: With Android tablets being an afterthought now, anyway, what’s to stop Google from starting over — yes, again — and encouraging companies to create Googlebook tablets next? It’d allow Google to rebrand and relaunch a category that’s always struggled to catch on and get past its not-so-exceptional early reputation. And for us, as users of these products, it’d give us some overdue options for a larger slate-like Android experience that’d work seamlessly with our phones, be pleasingly familiar and capable, and offer the unique advantage of having a mostly desktop-caliber browser for light work when such needs arise (with or without a keyboard connected) — all with the kind of timely and reliable software support promise any such product should provide. And — oh, yes — there’s more. Googlebook, Googlebook, everywhere Here’s the real mind-blowing next-step possibility to consider: If we do one day have Googlebook tablets — and the Googlebook OS software at the heart of them continues to evolve and become a core focus for Google as time moves on — how much of a leap would it be from there to see things streamlined and reaching a point where we also have Googlebook phones ? It brings me back, fittingly enough, to a question I posed over a decade ago — back when Android and ChromeOS were coming ever-closer together and it looked like that was the path Google was pursuing. Consider this now, with the notion of Googlebook OS in the mix in place of ChromeOS: If all Android apps can eventually run on ChromeOS — and if ChromeOS evolves to look more like Android while web apps and Android apps grow increasingly similar in design — would you notice the difference between a phone running Android and a phone running Chrome? The specific platforms and concepts at the center of this have shifted since we last thought this through in 2015 , but the idea itself is the same. And, once more, there’s no better way to end this contemplation than by saying: Welcome to the Matrix, my friends. Whoaaa . 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