We Don't Talk About the Googlebook Event - DTNS 5353

Tom Merritt (0:08)

This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 15th, the Ides of September 2026 We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand.

Jason Howell (0:21)

Yes, we're going to try and help all of us, myself included, to understand what I'm supposed to say right now. But particularly Google's Google Book event, which happened today, but we can't really talk about it, but we can still talk about Google Books. Does that make sense?

Tom Merritt (0:35)

Why Google? I don't understand.

We'll tell you what we know. I'm Tom Merritt.

Jason Howell (0:41)

I'm Jason Howell.

Tom Merritt (0:42)

Let's start with what you need to know with that big story.

Jason Howell (0:47)

Yes, so we've been talking about this. It's no secret that an event happened in New York City just this morning, a big Google Book event. But apparently, it is a secret as far as what happened there, because we can't talk about that. But we still have things to talk about, some information that is being discovered, some of it being announced by Google.

I pretty much can promise you that we'll talk about the event details sometime next week. Android Faithful's Ron Richards was there. I can confirm that, but can't get the details yet. So you're going to have to wait for that. What do we know about the Google Book right now? Why are we even talking about it? Well, we do know that Google plans to open pre-orders for the new Google Book on Monday, September 21st. That is next Monday, 9 a.m. Eastern, so 6 a.m. Pacific, if you want to get up real early on the West Coast. This is, of course, their laptop that is powered by Gemini Intelligence, and it's going to be it sounds like there's a lot of partners in line here. Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo. We don't have any specific models named yet by Google.

We also don't have anything as far as pricing or shipping dates. However, the Mac Observer reported on exclusive Lenovo images and a product sheet for the Lenovo Google Book 15 This might act as kind of an example or a sampling of what you can expect from other manufacturers. I'm guessing this is a premium laptop, metal chassis, 15.3 inch, 120 hertz OLED touch screen, Intel Core Ultra 5 325 processor inside up to 32 gigs of RAM. It's got Wi-Fi 7 It's got dual Thunderbolt 4 ports. It's got a Google key on it. So you're used to seeing like a Microsoft key on your Windows machine or whatever. This has a Google key. We don't really know what it does. But maybe we can guess around what that function might be here.

The laptop also has a 5-megapixel RGB webcam, physical privacy shutter, so you can flick it closed and get some privacy.

On the outer lid is the glow bar, and this is a thin multicolor strip of LED light, I'm assuming it's LED, that Lenovo says provides at least right off the top, it provides battery and charging status. So, okay, that's interesting. I mean, it's kind of like the little glowy thing on the back of the pixel, I suppose, but in bar form, who knows? There's a fingerprint reader, facial authentication listed as well. Lenovo is also set to offer an AI mouse for Google Book, that's what it's called, AI mouse for Google Book, which will share the multicolor accent that is shown on the laptop. No word on what makes it an AI mouse, but I think it's relatively safe. I don't know, you tell me, Tommy, you know, we know that the Google Book has this magic pointer functionality, which is essentially Gemini Intelligence baked into the pointer. So when, you know, it hovers over a certain thing, you can get immediate, use it as immediate context for Gemini. I mean, might that be what an AI mouse is? I don't know. That's more software than hardware, but I'm not sure.

Tom Merritt (4:05)

Yeah, I'm like, can not AI mouse not use magic pointer? I'll be curious as well. Or does it mean like they used an LLM to fine tune the precision of the pointer? Probably doesn't mean that. It probably just means it can do the magic pointer thing like any other mouse could. But yeah, that's silly. Let's just call it a mouse. I think it's also silly that Google had this big event that we know Ron was at, and that Ron's gonna talk to us about once everybody else knows about it when pre-orders start on Monday.

I don't quite understand. Maybe they're going for the double punch, which we're falling for right now, which is talk about it now, talk about it Monday, right?