Hot on the heels of Apple's iPhone-in-a-laptop, Google and Intel have teamed up to give us the Googlebook

While there's no chance that it was developed because Apple had chosen to do something similar, one can't help but draw parallels to the MacBook Neo. The newly announced Googlebook has your phone and AI at the heart of it all, and will supposedly bring "the best of Android…and ChromeOS", utilising hardware from Intel under the hood.

That's pretty much it as far as details go, other than some swooping imagery of glossy-looking laptops, a short tweet from Intel on the collaboration, and a statement about "working with industry leading partners like Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo."

Naturally, Gemini AI is going to be at the forefront of what the Googlebook can do, but if you have an Android phone, you'll be able to cast apps and access files directly from the phone without having to wire things up or install them. How well all this will work in reality is anyone's guess at this stage, but if it works as seamlessly as suggested, a Googlebook might be a good choice of laptop for work-on-the-go.

The real question of importance, however, is precisely what hardware is going to be underneath the hood. Since Intel is involved, the most obvious pick is either a small Panther Lake chip or even smaller Wildcat Lake. Both options are going to be very nice to have, though they really need fast LPDDR5 memory to shine.

Given how expensive DRAM is at the moment, if Google takes a leaf from Apple's MacBook Neo and goes with something like 8 or 12 GB, then it's unlikely that you're going to see any Googlebook topping a benchmark chart. That said, Wildcat Lake is light on power demand but strong on single-core performance, so you never know.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the Googlebook is the legacy of Chromebooks. These have been around for many years now, and while generally very cheap, they've accrued a reputation for being slow and of limited capability. Google's new devices are unlikely to be at the bottom end of the price scale, but the spectre of the Chromebook is going to be hard to exorcise.

We'll know for sure when the first models appear later this autumn.