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- Beautiful matte-finish OLED touchscreen
- Robust and attractive
- Usably responsive
- Software niggles
- Android app isn’t ready for laptops
- Mediocre battery life
I’ve already looked at the Googlebook OS in my review of the Acer Googlebook 14 and loved the hardware, but found the software a little rough around the edges. I’ve now got Asus’ first Googlebook laptop in front of me, and I find myself at risk of repeating myself.
It’s a lovely laptop, with a design that recalls Asus’ superb A-series machines we’ve so liked over the last couple of years. It’s light, slim and feels robust, with a matte-finish OLED touchscreen that’s a real treat for the eyes (and the fingers). It feels super responsive in use, too.
And yet, like the Acer Googlebook 14, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this product. No, it isn’t a complete disaster and, yes, it works perfectly well as a light-use laptop. But despite showing promise, Googlebook OS isn’t quite there yet.
What you need to know
Like the Acer Googlebook 14, the Asus version is a lightweight, premium 14in laptop designed for working on the move. It has a 14in 3K 120Hz OLED touchscreen topped with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus and a Corning Gorilla Matte anti-glare coating, and the chassis is constructed from magnesium alloy finished with Asus’ own rough-to-the-touch Ceraluminum, in dark grey.
Under the hood is an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 CPU with integrated Intel Graphics, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, and Googlebook OS software underpins everything. Despite appearances, this isn’t an overhaul of ChromeOS; it’s Android 17 with a desktop skin, so you’ll primarily get apps through Google Play, with web apps relegated to second place.
As you’d expect, Google is also building in plenty of AI-driven Gemini features here, but make no mistake, these are mostly window dressing. The big news is that Google has finally put effort into making Android more than a phone OS, and that is exciting.
Price and competition
Configuration tested: Intel Core Ultra 5 325 CPU, 16GB LPDDR5X RAM, 512GB SSD, 14in 120Hz 2,880 x 1,800 120Hz matte-finish OLED touchscreen. Price: £1,200
At launch, there is only one Asus Googlebook 14 variant with 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage and the 2.1GHz Intel Core Ultra 5 325 processor. You’ll eventually be able to buy it with an Intel Core Ultra 7, up to 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, but I don’t really want to think about how expensive that will be.
If you’re in the market for a Googlebook, its main rivals are the cheaper Acer Googlebook 14 (£999), the Lenovo Googlebook 15 (from £1,049), the HP Googlebook 14 (£1,199) and the Dell XPS Googlebook (from £1,261). I’ve only tested the Acer so far, and it’s a good laptop. It’s a 2-in-1 hybrid with a 360-degree hinge, but it lacks the matte display and haptic touchpad this Asus has. I prefer the Asus, just about.
If you’re not prepared to risk your money on an untried and (relatively) untested OS, you have plenty of options at this price. My pick would be the 13.6in Apple MacBook Air M5. It’s speedy, has decent battery life, runs silently without a cooling fan, and it starts at £1,299 for the same base RAM and storage. It’s the more powerful machine.
On the Windows front, you have a plethora of choices, either offering more power, RAM and storage for your money or the same for less. On the latter front, the best-value laptop we have reviewed this year is the Honor MagicBook 16, with a 16in screen, the same Intel Core Ultra 5 325 CPU as the Asus Googlebook, plus 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD.
You could also grab the Asus Zenbook A14, effectively the Windows-on-ARM counterpart to the Googlebook, with a Snapdragon X2 Elite chip and no matte screen or touch support for the same money (£1,199).
Googlebook OS
It’s great that Google has finally put some effort into adapting Android for productivity devices. It’s long overdue, but I think it’s spent too much time on AI features and other shiny new baubles rather than sorting out the important things.
The new AI features are, ultimately, nothing particularly exciting. The new Magic Cue feature allows you to wiggle your cursor and point at things to get AI help with them and is handy, but ultimately a bit of fluff.
The smart File Manager, which can describe the contents of your files in the file listing, is a little more useful, but the File manatee here is quite basic and misses core capabilities like bulk rename.
The Rambler speech-to-text tool is clever, too; it removes your ums and ahhs and constructs sentences from your garbled speech, but it’s flawed. You have to finish what you’re saying before you can see how it interprets what’s said; it doesn’t “type” out the words as you speak.
Even its most useful feature, close integration with Android phones, is hampered. This lets you stream apps from your phone to the laptop’s display and copy and paste files from connected phones seamlessly, but Samsung, the biggest Android phone manufacturer, doesn’t currently support it.
What Google should have spent more time on is the app ecosystem. Not even its own apps work particularly well on desktop, which is not a good sign. In particular, it has done nothing to “appify” core productivity apps such as Google Docs and Sheets. Whenever you launch a document for editing from the Drive app, it redirects to the web app. At times, it feels you might as well just be using Chrome OS.
And while it is good news that the Play Store has finally begun to make it easier to find apps that have been developed with desktop in mind, by labelling them “optimised for desktop”, “made for desktop” or “compatible with desktop”, the simple fact is that most Android apps still don’t work well on a large screen or with a mouse and keyboard. It will take time to change that.
Elsewhere, the core OS isn’t particularly polished. New issues I’ve spotted here concern the touchpad, which doesn’t seem to have particularly effective palm rejection. In split view, I’ve experienced distracting screen flicker from the out-of-focus app, and I’ve encountered an intermittent issue with the pop-up G menu, which occasionally refuses to accept keyboard inputs when I launch it. I’ve also noticed that when you adjust the brightness with the keyboard shortcut, it seizes focus from the app you’re using for about three seconds after using it, leaving you waiting before you can start typing again. That’s just silly.
On the positive side, you absolutely can get all your work done on a Googlebook if you’re prepared to put up with a few gremlins. I’ve used both the Acer and Asus Googlebook 14 for days at a time, writing and uploading to our CMS, editing raw photos using Snapseed and general emailing, and it worked just fine. It was responsive throughout, with no big crashes or freezes, and switching between apps was quick and snappy. I just wish Google had spent a bit more time polishing the OS.
Design, keyboard and touchpad
A large part of what has made both Googlebooks I’ve used so far relatively easy to live with is that they’re beautifully put together. Since much of that is down to the minimum spec that Google mandates for devices to use the Googlebook name, I’ve got to give the search giant some credit here.
I’m not too fussed about the mandatory “glow bar” on the lid. It only tells you your power and battery status and whether you’re having a conversation with Gemini. But a minimum of 16GB and the stipulation that these must be “flagship” thin-and-light machines, built with premium materials, help.
Beyond that, you have the new G key, which is a bit like the Windows key: it launches the Start menu, searches the laptop, runs web searches and launches apps. And there’s the Quick Insert key, which replaces Caps Lock, just like on Chromebooks.
Regardless of the requirements, though, this Asus laptop is a lovely thing. The rough finish feels great and resists fingerprints like a champ. It’s light, slim and wonderfully robust, too.
The keyboard is quite pleasant to type on, though the keycaps are more slippery than I’d like. The touchpad is both sensitive and smooth under the finger. As I mentioned above, it does have a palm-rejection problem (and there appears to be no key to disable it), but on the positive side it is haptic, so clicks register all across its surface, not just the bottom half.
Plus there’s loads of practicality to go around here, too: two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C sockets split across the left and right-hand edges, a pair of USB-A ports, an HDMI video output and one 3.5mm audio jack.
Display
One reason to consider the Asus Googlebook 14 over its Windows counterpart (the Zenbook A14) is the display. The Windows-based Zenbook A14 has a fairly basic 1,920 x 1,200 non-touch 60Hz OLED screen with a glossy finish; the Googlebook gets a sharper 3K panel that refreshes at up to 120Hz and has touch support.
The killer feature here, however, is its Corning Gorilla Matte finish. This resists reflections beautifully and feels wonderful under the finger when you’re swiping and prodding at the display.
Colour reproduction and accuracy are nothing special. I measured the gamut at 89% of DCI-P3 and the average delta E (colour error) at 2.11 versus sRGB in the laptop’s natural mode, and 2.87 against Display P3 in the Boosted mode. But nothing looks completely out of whack to the eye.
Plus, it’s bright, with standard dynamic range material peaking at 538cd/m2 and HDR material at up to 1,215/m2. While the matte finish reduces perceived contrast when light hits it, the extra brightness helps mitigate it.
The upshot is that it looks great with all types of content. I had no technical issues displaying HDR material either, whether on YouTube or other streaming services. You do need to enable HDR in the display settings, though.
Performance
The Intel Core 5 Ultra inside my review sample has eight physical cores and eight threads, so it’s a capable multitasker, especially when it’s backed up, as it is here, with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM.
That leads to similar Geekbench results to the Acer Googlebook 14. They’re not identical, however. For some reason, the Acer’s results are lower across Geekbench 6 and 7, OpenCL and Vulkan. The Asus model is significantly less powerful than the MacBook Air M5, though, and also lags behind the Asus Zenbook A14 (2026).
This is clearly not a laptop for AAA gaming or heavy creative work such as video editing. For everything else, it’s perfectly capable.
As with the Acer Googlebook, I’ve spent days abusing this laptop, loading the browser with tens of tabs and apps, and I haven’t experienced much slowdown or sluggishness. Some screen transition animations can chug a little and don’t look as slick as they do on a MacBook, but the system has remained supremely responsive overall.
Battery life, on the other hand, is worrying. Asus rates it at up to 18hrs, but in my tests, playing a video back from local storage with the screen set to 170cd/m2, it lasted a mere 12hrs 30mins. That may have been acceptable for thin, light Windows laptops a couple of years ago, but things have moved on.
We’re regularly seeing machines last 20 hours and more in this test these days. In use, the Asus Googlebook 14 lasted most of a working day, but needed a top-up in the evening. It’s certainly no match for the Snapdragon X2 Elite-powered Asus Zenbook A14, which lasted more than double that at a phenomenal 29hrs 32 minutes. It is better than the MacBook Neo, though.
Should you buy the Asus Googlebook 14?
Awarding a star rating to a product like the Asus Googlebook 14 is tricky. On the one hand, this is a hugely likeable piece of hardware. I absolutely love the matte display and the lightweight, rough, fingerprint-resistant finish. I like its responsiveness and the feel of the touchpad, while the selection of ports and sockets makes it practical in a way that productivity tablets can only dream of.
On the other hand, Googlebook OS isn’t quite as polished as I’d like, and the battery life is mediocre. These two things aren’t enough to rule the Asus Googlebook 14 out completely, but they put a big dent in its appeal. As it stands, that makes this machine likeable but hard to recommend wholeheartedly.
