Googlebook OS trails its own hardware, The Verge's early testing finds

Antonio Di Benedetto linked Signal's Android app to his phone with ease. Then he found that sending a message takes Ctrl+Enter, and that clicking and dragging scrolls the conversation up and down instead of highlighting text ^[10]. Scroll to the left of the virtual desktops and a Clear All button appears that kills every open app at once, a gesture carried over from Android's phone app switcher ^[11]. "If I'm closing all apps at once on a laptop I'm either rebooting or shutting down," he wrote ^[12].

The Verge describes the pitch as a fresh, well-designed alternative to Windows or Mac for people who already own an Android phone ^[13]. A Google rep told Di Benedetto at the launch preview that replacing ChromeOS with Android would allow much faster development ^[18]. A week in, the testers are working around tablet software on a laptop. Di Benedetto wrote that Googlebook OS feels like a bit of a setback from ChromeOS at launch ^[14]. Photoshop and Lightroom are passable for the simplest image editing, he wrote, but he would take a cheap Windows laptop with proper desktop apps over these mobile-first versions ^[15].

One section of the testers' notes is headed "Google has a big, big developer problem" ^[2]. Its author wrote that Android now works relatively well on phones, tablets, TVs and cars. "The apps are another story," the tester added ^[3]. The few apps properly optimized for Googlebooks make the device feel more like a laptop, but many of them still fail to show their content while a window is being resized ^[4]. The staff say some of the platform's problems are systemic to Android ^[5].

The web-app route has failures of its own. "Even something as simple as installing the progressive web app version of Slack isn't working properly," Di Benedetto wrote, and he could not say whether to be mad at Slack or Google ^[16].

His verdict for buyers is blunt. "If I bought one of these Googlebooks I'd be mad at myself for being a paying beta tester for Google," he wrote ^[17]. He still sees something cool in the machines, and he wrote that he wants the promised faster development to arrive far more quickly ^[19].

These are notes from testing still under way, by four staff across all five launch models ^[6]. They do not detail the hardware beyond the great-to-excellent rating.

I'd buy one or two units for a pilot and hold any fleet order until Google and the app makers ship fixes. Waiting has a cost. The hardware is already good, and the people asking for these machines are probably the Android phone owners the pitch is aimed at.

To pick who gets a pilot unit, list the five apps each candidate opens every working day and sort them on two questions. The first is whether each app runs as an Android app or in the browser. The second is whether the work is heavy text input and editing, or mostly reading and watching. A person whose day is browser-based reading is the safest pilot. A person whose day runs through Android apps and heavy editing is the one most likely to hit the Signal and Photoshop problems above, and should keep their current laptop. The two mixed cases are where a pilot tells you something new: run them for two weeks and count how many of the five apps needed a workaround.