Topic
Portable personal computers sold to individuals, covering their designs, components, prices and the operating systems they ship with.
Pre-orders opened for Googlebooks from Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Dell and HP, with units shipping October 5. The continuity Google demonstrated moves a draft from an Android phone to the laptop, one direction only.
Reality
The Verge's hands-on describes a laptop meant to do for Android phones what the MacBook does for the iPhone. The handoff, app casting and phone file browsing at the centre of that pitch all require a handset already running Android 17.
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Pre-orders opened for five laptops that ship on October 4, and every phone-integration feature Google demonstrated at its New York event needs an Android handset. The Chromebook parts carry over.
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Continue On, the Files app and Cast My Apps are what a Googlebook has that an ordinary laptop does not, and all three of them reach into an Android phone. That dependency decides who should buy one.
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Chrome Unboxed handled all five launch machines from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo at Google's New York preview. The cheapest is Acer's $899 convertible and the ASUS is $1,299, with premium materials throughout.
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Rick Osterloh's own laptop is a 16GB Dell XPS Googlebook, one of five machines launching on Googlebook OS. The Verge's account of how the project began is also a record of two earlier attempts to join ChromeOS and Android.
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Engadget's hands-on with the Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo machines found at least 16GB of memory in every one, two chip architectures across the five, and a lid light array developers cannot program yet. Pre-orders are open.
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