Google opened pre-orders on Monday for the first five Googlebook laptops, built by Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo. The cheapest model starts at $899, and the machines reach US retail on October 4, with international markets a day later.
The silicon is split three ways. Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 supplies the Acer Googlebook 14, the only configuration under $1,000, with 16GB of memory, 512GB of storage and a 2.8K OLED touchscreen. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite powers the Dell XPS Googlebook at $1,199, rated for up to 18 hours of battery life.
MediaTek will join later. The company announced the Dimensity CX C10 Max, the first part in a new line of compute chips, built on TSMC’s 3nm process. It pairs an octa-core all-big-core CPU with an 11-core GPU and a dedicated NPU, and MediaTek rates it at 55 TOPS. The design targets fanless laptops, and it will appear in a Lenovo Googlebook rather than any launch model.
Googlebook OS blends Android and ChromeOS, runs Android apps natively and adds a cursor gesture that hands control to Gemini.
Qualcomm has spent three years pushing Snapdragon X into Windows laptops. A second platform gives that effort a new venue, and hands Intel another front to defend.
