Who the GoogleBook is For: Android Users - DTNS 5357

Tom Merritt (0:08)

This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, September 21st, the 21st night of September. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand.

Robb Dunewood (0:19)

Today, the Google Books are out, and Ron Richards got his hands on them. Should you look into getting one?

Tom Merritt (0:25)

I don't know, but I'm kind of thinking maybe. Maybe, maybe. I don't know.

I'm Tom Merritt.

Robb Dunewood (0:30)

And I'm Robb Dunewood.

Tom Merritt (0:31)

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

Robb Dunewood (0:37)

Last week, Google invited folks to an event to show off the new Google Books, which we can now preorder starting today. Android faithfuls Ron Richards was at the event and gives us the scoop on Google's new entry into the high-end laptop space.

Tom Merritt (0:51)

Ron Richards, thank you for joining us and relaying what happened so long ago last week when you were at the Google Book event. But preorders are available now.

Give us the scoop. What can you tell us about the Google Book?

Ron Richards (1:06)

Yes. The long-awaited Google Book, we finally, I held it in my hands. I saw it. I went last week in New York City, saw Samir Samat, as well as the rest of the team from Google, give a great keynote presentation where they walked us through all the details about the Google Book. You might remember back in May, around the time of Google IO and the Android show, they kind of unveiled the name of the Google Book, and they showed some stuff like the magic cursor and some very high-level stuff, but they didn't mention any of the OEM partners, they didn't mention price point, they didn't mention any text specifics about the specs of the laptops. We got all those details, and they rolled out all that today, and it's all available for pre-order. You can go to the Google Store or go to Best Buy, and you can start pre-ordering them. They're going to start being available on October 4th, so in a couple of weeks, and you can get them in the US, October 4th in the US, and October 5th in Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia.

So where to start? You want to start on the software side or the hardware side?

Tom Merritt (2:09)

Start us on the hardware specs, because I think that's what people are... We're interested in the software, of course, but everybody's like, yeah, but what's underlying these machines? What's the power here?

Ron Richards (2:20)

So they went premium with these. So they're starting at 899 from a price point. So that's kind of the headline. And you've got five OEM partners with Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo.

And not terribly surprising if you follow Chromebooks and the partners that Google's worked with in the past in the laptop side. It's like, oh, hey, there's an Acer. Of course there is, right? But what's interesting is that they all kind of stick to their lanes in terms of what they've done in the past. Similarly with the Chromebooks, that's kind of one thing that I did notice. So for example, the Acer is the convertible one, right? That's the one that is technically a Google Book flip that flips around to a tablet or a laptop depending on how you want to do it, which Acer is, they love to live in that zone. Dell went very, it's an XPS, it's very premium, it's very high-end, design-forward and that sort of thing. Lenovo went super productivity.

The woman there from Lenovo spent a lot of time showing me the mouse and how well the mouse works with it.

And one thing we'll get into is the fact that the Glowbar is back. Oh, thank goodness. Yeah, thank you, of course. We all love to in the Glows, but Lenovo integrated the Glowbar technology, not only because the Glowbar is a LED strip that's on the top of the laptop. So when you're using the laptop, you can't see it. But on the Lenovo, they put an LED strip on the mouse and the Glowbar effects happen on the mouse too. So they were very proud of that. But that Lenovo has got a big 15-inch screen, right? The Asus was super light. It was like 2.2 pounds. So they all kind of bring their own little individual flavor to it. But the baseline spec for the laptops across the board was pretty strong. 16 gig of RAM at minimum, up to 32 gig on some of the models. Touch screens up to 28K OLED. They've all got haptic glass track pads. That was something there in the keynote that they went into about how much thought went into the track pads across all the laptops and the haptics and how you interact with it, especially on the software integration with Gemini and the Magic Cursor and all that sort of stuff. They got backlit keyboards. Batteries are rated up to 18 hours of video and 16 hours of web browsing.