Acer Googlebook 14 review: Android’s attempt to take over the desktop

The Googlebook is a new laptop from Google and its hardware partners that takes the general idea of the Chromebook and injects a bit more Android into it. Instead of running everything through the browser, it can run Android apps as if they were normal desktop programs, benefiting from the huge software ecosystem that has sprung up around Android phones and tablets.

The hardware - the one we have here is from Acer, but examples from HP, Lenovo, Dell XPS, and Asus are also out there, with varying specs and prices - seems solid, and if you’re embedded in the universe of Google accounts and Android apps, it can look like a good buy. The only problem is that many apps are going to require an update before they can run perfectly on it, and lots of mobile photo and video apps are shadows of their desktop versions.

Specification

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 355

NPU: Intel AI Boost

Graphics: Integrated

Memory: 16GB LPDDR5X

Storage: 512GB SSD

Screen size: 14in

Screen type: OLED touchscreen

Resolution: 2880 x 1800

Refresh rate: 120Hz

Ports: 1x Thunderbolt 4, 2x USB-C, 1x 3.5mm audio

Wireless connectivity: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6

Dimensions: 14 x 312 x 223mm

Weight: 1.15kg

Price and Availability

If you go into buying a Googlebook thinking that it will be as low-cost as a Chromebook, then you’re in for a surprise. The Acer is one of the cheapest models available at launch, and it’s still $899 / £899. When you can buy a MacBook Neo and a posh dinner for your family for the same price, then it looks like less of a budget option.

Design

Acer’s Googlebook 14 is a rather nice shade of dark blue and has a Googlebook signature - the Glowbar - prominently on its lid. The idea of this little lightbar is that it reacts to your voice while you’re talking to the Gemini AI chatbot, but in everyday use it’s probably going to spend more time acting as a charging level indicator. Google is determined to insert its AI into as much of our lives as possible, and so it is here, with Gemini baked into the OS.

There are some useful things, like the Magic Pointer, which sees you wiggle the mouse pointer near something you’re interested in, summoning Gemini, which then tells you about it, hopefully accurately. It’s a bit like circling to search on Android phones, and can work well. There's also voice control, accessed with "OK Google".

The other brilliant thing about a Googlebook is the way it can link to your Android phone. You can use your phone to set it up, even logging in with the same PIN. While perfectly capable of running all the Android apps you could need, if there's one on your phone that’s not on your laptop it can run it from there, streaming the output to the laptop screen, running it in a horizontal window rather than a vertical phone-screen shape, and giving it mouse support rather than relying on the touchscreen.

It’s not absolutely perfect - some adverts in apps we tried refused to play ball - but it’s very clever. It does rely on you having a reasonably up-to-date Android phone, though.

Acer’s Googlebook is a two-in-one design, so it can be folded back on itself into a pseudo-tablet, the OS happily adapting itself to the new way of working. It’s a touch-friendly computer even when not in tablet mode, and you can use a stylus on the screen, though there isn’t one in the box.

There's also good connectivity, with a fast Thunderbolt 4 port that can be broken out with all kinds of adapters, and two more USB-Cs. It might have been nice to have had a native HDMI port, though.

Performance

There's no issue with the hardware Acer has chosen for this Googlebook; Intel’s Core Ultra 7 355 is an eight-core mid-range chip that flies along under the lightweight Googlebook OS rather than Windows 11. With 16GB of RAM and a decent SSD, there's nothing in the specs to complain about.

The issue is in the applications. Android has been around a long time, and there are a lot of apps for it, but very few of them are as good as the versions you’d find for a Windows PC or Mac.

Take the Adobe apps - you can get Lightroom and Photoshop for Android, and they run on the Googlebook, but they have different interfaces and reduced feature sets compared to their desktop counterparts.

There's no InDesign or Affinity for Android (even though an iPad version of the latter should be out by the end of the year, the developers don’t seem to be porting it to Google’s platform), and many video editing apps are aimed at social media use and are designed around a portrait orientation. You can run the video editing app CapCut Pad on the Googlebook, and it has a ‘compatible with desktop’ line on its store page that we’d like to see more of.

The actual benchmarked performance of the laptop is pretty good, especially with the eight-core Core Ultra chip we have here. It’s running applications originally built to run on a phone or tablet, and while it’s not going to trouble something like the Apple M5 processor in terms of single-core performance, it doesn’t need to.

In Geekbench tests, it beats a smartphone - the Google Pixel 10 Pro in this case - but lags behind an iPad Pro M5, which is exactly where you’d expect it to be. Third-gen Intel Core Ultra CPUs are very good at eking out the battery life, and you can expect to see 12 hours of constant use out of this model, especially if you’re only browsing or watching videos.

Verdict

By essentially porting Android to a laptop, Google has attempted to sidestep many of the issues that come with first-generation devices. The OS is mature and stable, and the app store is well-stocked. There's nothing wrong with Acer’s hardware here; the screen is lovely and the build quality is high, but photo and video editors might need to wait for the software to catch up before they make a Googlebook their primary machine.