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There are a ton of Android users in the world. Something like 70 to 75% of phones sold every single year are Android phones. And this right here is the first laptop that was designed for those users. So the idea is to have a phone and a laptop that work together. So all your workflow, your apps, your messages, all of it in this nice ecosystem that just works fluidly. Now, Apple's had an ecosystem like this for years, but Android users, they've had to get like thirdparty apps or tools or just workarounds to get their laptops to interact with their phones in any manner. And this is Google's proper attempt at doing it. So, it's called a Google book. This one in particular is
one of the more interesting ones. It's the thinnest. It's the lightest. It has the most number of ports. It's got an awesome screen. And it also has this glow bar at the top like all the Google books do. This is the Asus Google Book 14. And the ecosystem vibes are immediate right when you pull this thing out of the box. So when they shipped this to me, they didn't even power it off. This was actually in sleep mode. The moment I popped it open, it tried to pair with my phone. A prompt popped up. I scanned a QR code and it did the full setup automatically. Like all the passwords, the Wi-Fi network apps, the whole setup was on autopilot. And once
you're in, it does feel like an Android laptop. It's got the circular app icons, the dock on the bottom, the way the UI interacts and animates, and even like the settings menu. This looks and feels just like the kind of modern material design language from Google. It feels like Chromebook. Like there's still like Chromebook vibes on this thing, but visually the way that you interact with this, it immediately feels more like an Android device than a Chromebook. But the big thing is the file system. So any kind of file that you interact with will appear in the files app. And unlike a Chromebook, you can actually move these things up wherever you want. Like you want to put on your desktop, you can. Uh
I just moved some random markdown [clears throat] file there, but you can just interact with it like a logical operating system would allow you to do. And it seems so stupid. Some of you might be like, Dave, why are you getting excited over moving files onto the desktop? A file system to me like makes a laptop feel like a proper laptop when you don't have that. You're just dealing with basically a phone, like a large tablet or something. Now, in terms of the concept of an ecosystem, the idea like, you know, a phone and a laptop, they work better together when they can interact fluidly together. So, right now, this is very early on in the launch of this product. It works reasonably
well, like some stuff is buggy, but if you're using your phone and you want to continue with it on your laptop, you can click on this icon down here and usually you're in. Uh, it can also open up your phone apps in a window on the laptop. It gets streamed in, so you can interact with that app using the laptop. You can access your phone storage wirelessly. So, if you have photos or files that you want to transfer back and forth between your laptop and your phone, you can just go to the sidebar there and just send it over. Uh, in terms of messages, so yeah, you get a message, it shows up on your phone, and obviously it shows up on the Google book as well. But phone calls right now don't do anything. When I
receive a phone call on the phone, nothing shows up on the Google book. Like, there's no notification. I can't take the call on here. I'm assuming that's something that comes in the relatively near future, but I was surprised that's missing right now. All of these features do require the phone to have Android 17. So, one of the recent Pixels or Samsung's latest phones will do it. Every other phone, because Google treats you guys like secondass citizens, you have to wait for Android to have a OTAA and then it should in theory work with these systems. Now, this is all about the ecosystem conversation, which is great, which is half the reason why the Google Books even exists. But the other half as to why this product even exists, let me
just shut this down real quick. It is a touch screen as you can see. The other half is for Gemini. And first of all, look how quickly the system boots. Uh I just hit it. I think it's like and actually time it. It feels like 20 seconds or so. But you'll notice when it boots up that Gemini Intelligence is printed right on that boot screen because it is the other half of the pitch. So this runs Google Book OS. It's an operating system that is built off of the Android stack, not off of Chrome OS. Uh, I'm just log in real quick here. Don't look at my password. It's super secure. And this is an operating system that was built, at least what they're saying, with AI in mind. This has Gemini
built right into the OS. So, it has all the kind of Google AI features we would expect, like, hey Google. But the F actually let's just ask hey uh what is the main feature that is being showcased with the launch of the new Google book laptops. The standout highlight is deep system level Gemini intelligence. It powers features like magic pointer where wiggling the okay the feature that they are showcasing and highlighting in all their marketing material is magic pointer and a bizarre way to activate it with the wiggle. So magic pointer it is a feature that when you enable you can wiggle the cursor or hit the Google button G and you can point at things or box select things on screen and it'll get Gemini to
interact with it. It's kind of like circle to search, but much more capable because instead of just looking things up, you're trying to get Gemini to do something with it. So, you could mouse over like a date or something in an email and then have it send it to your calendar and make an actual block in your calendar. The thing it's very useful, don't get me wrong, but the thing I find really weird is the whole wiggle to activate it. Having used this for a bit, there's no scenario where I'm like, this is the way that I would want to use the system. Why are they marketing this wiggle like it's some novel way to interact with the computer? And the thing is you're doing it with
the cursor. So like you're I don't know, you're mousing over something, you got to wiggle the cursor and then realign your cursor back to the thing you're trying to box select or click on. It's super weird. I don't get it. All the ads are about this and even when I asked Gemini just now, what's the thing? They talk about the wiggle. It is so bizarre to me. I'm not seeing it. Uh so there's other AI features like the ability to dictate to your computer and it'll clean it up. It's the same Rambler feature we saw on their phones. The other thing is create a widget. So, I think that the widget creation tool works better on a laptop than it does on a phone. I mean, functionally they're the same, but
because of the screen real estate on a laptop, I think it's just more useful to have multiple custom widgets on a laptop size screen. So to get the Google book to do Google book things, one of the features that they talked about before but have kind of like veiled recently is their proactive assistance. So it is a tool that if you look it up real quickly, it uses what's on your screen and your notifications, your location, and info from apps. And because it's Google that's slurping it all up, I don't know how I feel about this because in order for this product to do the best version of AI that it can, this should be enabled. But at the same time, this is the type of stuff that I hate. Like
this is the stuff that most people should be wary of and be like, I don't want this in my life. But then it takes away the ability for the Google book to do Google book things. So the Gemini and ecosystem features are kind of neat and they might be useful for you if you can fit them into your workflow. But how is this as an actual laptop? The hardware is really good. So, this is a better built laptop than I would have expected for the money. It's one hand openable. The screen is 120 Hz OLED. It's a matte finish touchscreen, so fingerprints don't show up as easily. Uh the keyboard is a banger. Really like it. It's super thin, super light, and has very responsive sleepwake characteristics.
Like when you open it up, it's like screen comes on quickly. The sleep is consistent and reliable. This has a lot of things going on actually that the MacBook Air doesn't even have. This has a much nicer screen. It's got USBA. It's got HDMI. It's got the glow bar, which I personally don't find super useful because it's on the back of the device. You can't really see it. Uh it has 10 years of software updates, which I think is like as cool as that is, Google could have said any number. They could have said this has 200 years of software support and it wouldn't have made a difference because it's Google. They can axe products whenever they want and they've done it, right? So, in 3 years
time, if they decide that Google Books aren't the move, it could go into the graveyard. That's just how it's been sometimes. Now, the main concern I have about Google Books is software support. This only runs Android apps. So, when they first announced this, I was like, that can't be that big of a deal cuz many people already run their stuff almost exclusively on cloud with no desktop apps. And there was promise of developers bringing full desktop caliber apps to Google Book. And there are a few, you'll see some apps in the Play Store that are listed as optimized for desktop and these are just like pre-existing apps that they've tuned a
bit for Google Books, like having like a resizable window or something. And then there's other apps that are listed as being built for desktop, which are supposed to be re-engineered from the ground up to take advantage of the screen real estate and the functionality of a laptop. Anti-gravity is a good example of an app that was built specifically for Google Book OS, but most other apps are not doing this. And because of that, you have very few full applications that run or just take advantage of the laptop form factor. And so I feel like there's an expectation that's not being met cuz these are expensive. They start at $900 right now.
This one in particular, the Asus one is $1,300 and excellent hardware. But it just feels like when you're spending this kind of money, this should have extremely good functionality. Like this should go way beyond just you know Gemini and ecosystem. It should be a full-fledged computer because the competitors deliver that. Like look at the MacBook Air that can run full desktop apps really well. This product if it was like 6 or 700 bucks it'd be a very different story. I'd be much more excited about it because this makes sense as at the price point for like a cloud only or a cloud ccentric workflow. But in its current state this feels super niche. There just are not enough
real applications or full applications that work on this device. There is a Linux environment like you have access to the terminal, you can install Linux apps. I mean, for the niche crowd that loves that, this is cool. But for the 70 plus% of people that have Android phones that are looking at this are like, "Hey, this will be a perfect laptop. It's really good, but only if you're willing to pay for premium hardware that's basically a cloud ccentric Android experience." Cuz if you're looking for Windows or Mac OS caliber apps, they're not ready. like not even close. Maybe years out from now we could get there though. Okay, there you have it.
