Dell XPS Googlebook Review: Beautiful Hardware For A Useless Platform

Dell's XPS Googlebook (rated 6.5/10) takes the well-regarded XPS 13 hardware — a slim 2.2-pound metal chassis, a 13.4-inch InfinityEdge display, a comfortable keyboard, and a Snapdragon X Elite chip with 16GB of RAM — and pairs it with Googlebook OS, a new platform combining Android and ChromeOS with integrated Gemini AI. In testing, the hardware impressed, but the software proved a "hot mess": Play Store Android apps are unoptimized (Slack only shows one channel at a time, Evernote is missing entirely), basic tasks like resizing a photo required stumbling through several apps, and phone syncing is redundant. Gemini AI features work reasonably well, as does the Rambler AI dictation, but neither justifies the platform. Battery life was inconsistent, with some background apps draining power rapidly. The reviewer concludes that since the identical hardware is available as a $999 Windows 11 XPS 13 with a mature app ecosystem, the $1,000 XPS Googlebook is practically pointless and only worth considering by Gemini AI enthusiasts.

(Source：Engadget)