Dell XPS Googlebook Review | Two Weeks Later, I Was Wrong
Almost two weeks ago, I told you that Googlebook OS wasn't finished and that nobody should buy this laptop yet. I was convinced it was too rough around the edges to recommend to anyone. But over the last couple of weeks, something unexpected happened: I slowly started falling in love with this thing.
For years, Android users have wanted a laptop that seamlessly fits into their mobile setup. We tried forcing solutions like Microsoft Phone Link to bridge the gap on Windows, but those workarounds always felt clunky, disconnected, and half-baked. With Googlebook OS, we finally have a laptop that feels like a natural extension of our phones.
This isn't a story about a flawless device, it is a story about a platform that still has plenty of quirks to clean up, but is getting the core ecosystem experience so exceptionally right.
Before diving into the software, it is worth acknowledging the physical hardware itself. The Dell XPS 13 hardware is genuinely fantastic. The build quality feels premium, the display is crisp, and the tactile feedback from the keyboard and haptic trackpad makes it a joy to use as a daily machine.
That said, while the physical chassis is solid, this review is really about Googlebook OS. Hardware is only as good as the software driving it, and that is where the real story of this device lives.
The Surface Duo Comparison
The last time I used a device that felt this unfinished, yet made me love using it this much, was the original Surface Duo. If you know my channel history, you know I loved that phone, advocated for it constantly, and spent endless hours finding fixes and workarounds for its quirks. Googlebook OS gives me that exact same feeling.
Now, making a Surface Duo comparison might sound a little ominous given how that saga ended, but hear me out. The raw potential here is massive. The vision of what this OS is trying to accomplish is clear and incredibly exciting, but man, is it a bit rough around the edges right now.
What’s Getting Done Right
Let’s talk about why I’ve grown to love using this machine, because when Googlebook OS gets things right, it feels downright futuristic.
First off, performance overall feels really good. This operating system paired with the Snapdragon X Elite chip performs extremely well and feels super responsive. Animations are smooth, and I am not seeing dropped frames when minimizing or maximizing windows. Apps open basically instantaneously, which makes sense when you consider that this is essentially Android apps and a browser running on desktop hardware. Even when you are running tons of apps all at the same time, the system never struggles.
That responsiveness shines brightest in split screen. I have spent a lot of time jumping back and forth between different applications without the system ever flinching or slowing down. I keep the browser taking up 70% of the display for main work, and then I dock up these other apps on the 30% side. Tools like YouTube Music, Audible, Discord, or Google Messages render cleanly beside your main workspace without wasting a pixel of display real estate. Mixing, matching, and swapping these active phone apps alongside full desktop web sessions, all running simultaneously without a hint of lag, makes multitasking feel seamless, even if it does occasionally forget to snap new windows to the pre-existing size.
Building directly on that app performance is Cross-Device Services, which is easily a standout ecosystem feature, especially now that it has rolled out to One UI 9 Galaxy devices. The way this laptop communicates with an Android phone is what we’ve been waiting years to see. Notification sync is surprisingly solid: most of the time when an alert pops up on your screen and you dismiss it, it clears from your phone instantly, and vice versa.
Even better, if a notification arrives from an app you don’t have installed on the laptop, Googlebook OS seamlessly streams and casts that specific app directly from your phone in a clean floating window. When that happens, your phone screen briefly turns on, but the phone stays locked. If your phone is sitting in your pocket, you don't have to take it out or manually grant permission to allow the streaming to happen.
Beyond individual notifications, you also get full access to your phone's app drawer directly from the taskbar at all times. ChromeOS was such a massive pain to get this feature working on that it essentially never worked right for me, but here, it is rock solid. It has literally not failed for me a single time. The streamed apps behave just like they would on your phone, and you can even resize and reshape the windows to switch between a mobile layout and a tablet layout on the fly. The frame rate on the streamed window feels a little lower than a native app, but the utility is undeniable. Just the other day, I needed to tweak a setting on my Pebble watch. The Pebble app was only installed on my phone, so I clicked the phone icon on my taskbar, fired up the app in a floating window, adjusted the setting, and closed it out. My phone stayed in my pocket the entire time, and it worked beautifully.
Beyond notifications and app streaming, instant hotspot pairing makes working on the go completely friction free. You still can’t answer incoming phone calls directly on the laptop, which is definitely a key area where Google needs to step up and improve, but for everything else, the ecosystem glue is undeniably strong.
Then there is the dictation engine. Having a dedicated Rambler key right on the keyboard is incredible. I love this Pixel 11 feature so much that I actually run a patched Gboard app on my Z Fold 8 just to get access to it there too. I use it constantly on both devices, and it is remarkably good at turning messy, train-of-thought dictation into clean, natural text without forcing you to constantly pause and fix mistakes.
Circle to Search also translates smoothly from phones to a laptop layout, making it effortless to copy text right out of images or videos. Magic Pointer is another nice touch. I turned off the default shake-to-activate gesture, but triggering it manually turns out to be genuinely helpful when you need quick contextual tools on screen.
Web Apps vs. Android Apps
Despite the fact that Googlebooks natively run Android apps, Google has continued to push Progressive Web Apps like they did with Chromebooks. For core services like YouTube, YouTube Music, and Gmail, Google's stance seems to be that the web app version is superior to the Android app on a desktop layout.
I fundamentally disagree with that approach. For all intents and purposes, Android is still a mobile-first operating system. Googlebook OS is trying to transform Android into a true desktop operating system, but if Google wants developers and users to take that transition seriously, they need desktop quality Android apps. While we have seen progress with tablet optimized layouts, relying on web wrappers instead of building native, desktop-class Android apps sends a loud and clear signal to everyone paying attention that Google isn't taking this shift seriously enough.
Forcing web wrappers strips away core app functionality and flexibility that many users will find useful. For instance, running YouTube as a web app means you lose some of the most intuitive touch controls found on mobile and tablet setups. You cannot simply swipe up on a video to jump into full screen and swipe down to exit. With Gmail, using the web app means losing out on desktop home screen widgets, consistent notifications, and touch controls for things like simple account-swiping gestures.
That web-first push forces you to go digging for bizarre workarounds. Take Picture-in-Picture on YouTube as a perfect example. On a phone or Android tablet, popping a video out into a floating window is effortless. On this web setup, getting Picture-in-Picture requires right-clicking on the active video to bring up YouTube's custom context menu, and then right-clicking a second time on the video player to override it and trigger the browser's hidden native menu where the Picture-in-Picture option finally shows up. It works once you know the secret handshake, but needing a double right-click trick just to float a video frame is about as unintuitive as software design gets.
Ultimately, Google is undercutting its own push to make Googlebook OS a true desktop operating system. If Google itself is unwilling to do the work to give us a Gmail app with reliable notifications, desktop widgets, and intuitive touch controls, or a YouTube app with a properly touch optimized UI and easy to use picture and picture, why would any third-party developer bother building desktop-quality Android apps for this platform?
The Rough Edges
As much as I have come to love using this laptop, we need to talk about the reality of this software. Googlebook OS is still very much a work in progress, and at times, it really shows.
A big theme here is that so many features feel like great ideas that were left half-finished. Take "Create a Widget" as a prime example. You can use generative AI to build custom widgets on the fly. I set one up to pull local news stories, and while that concept is super cool, every single time you click a link inside that created widget, it opens up the web page twice in your browser.
Having access to the Google Play Store is great, but the app compatibility situation is really strange. You will search for basic, everyday applications only to find that they are listed as incompatible or completely missing. Google Authenticator is not available, which makes no sense for a Google OS, and third-party apps like TP-Link Tapo are blocked as well. The silver lining is that because this is Android under the hood, you can usually head over to APK Mirror and sideload the APK files yourself. Most sideloaded apps will run fine, but you should not have to manually bypass the Play Store just to get basic utilities onto your laptop.
On top of app limitations, the OS has some baffling gesture and UI bugs. The built-in setup tutorial literally teaches you touchpad gestures that do not exist or do not function in the actual operating system. There is an audio bug where the physical volume level stays constant, but the sound you hear constantly drifts, getting randomly quieter and louder during playback. Recent updates seem to have improved this issue somewhat, but it still is not totally fixed. Even basic launcher settings have issues, like app icons continuously forcing themselves onto the desktop during installation until you toggle the setting on and off to reset it.
Finally, we have to talk about full system stability. Over the past couple of weeks, I have experienced three or four full system crashes where the laptop completely froze and rebooted on its own. The first time I ever triggered the Rambler dictation key, the system froze, crashed, and rebooted immediately. While the reboot takes under 30 seconds, hard crashes on a daily driver laptop are tough to ignore.
Better Than Windows?
Despite all of these bugs and early-adopter quirks, there is a flip side to this coin that keeps pulling me back: in many ways, I actually find Googlebook OS to be more intuitive and modern to use than Windows 11.
Windows 11 is a massive operating system built on top of decades of legacy code that Microsoft cannot or will not change because of enterprise compatibility. That legacy baggage makes basic OS tasks feel fragmented. A perfect example of this is something as simple as uninstalling an application. On Windows 11, you open the Start menu, right-click an app, and hit uninstall. Sometimes it uninstalls right then and there. Other times, it kicks you over to the modern Settings app where you have to search for the program again. And occasionally, it throws you all the way back into the legacy Control Panel, a menu layout that looks like it hasn't been updated in fifteen years, just to remove a single program.
On Googlebook OS, you don't have to navigate through historical layers of software like an archaeological dig. If you want to uninstall an application, you right-click the icon, hit uninstall, and it is gone instantly. The settings menus are clean, straightforward, and logically organized. It doesn't feel bogged down by twenty years of legacy bloat, and that modern, stripped-back approach makes daily navigation feel much smoother than navigating the maze of Windows.
The Verdict
When you step back and look at the whole picture, Googlebook OS leaves you in a really interesting spot.
On one hand, there is a ton of work that still needs to be done here. While seeing Cross-Device Services expand out to One UI 9 Galaxy devices is a huge step in the right direction, Google still needs to broaden phone support even further across the broader Android ecosystem. Beyond device compatibility, they need to push out consistent system updates to address the hard crashes, clean up the broken gestures, and ensure that new features like Create a Widget actually work correctly. Until those stability and refinement gaps are closed, this remains a really difficult laptop to recommend to most people.
Yet, despite every single one of those rough edges, I keep finding myself drawn right back to this machine.
That is what makes this platform so fascinating to use. It reminds me so much of my time with the original Surface Duo. It is undeniably raw and incomplete, but underneath those early-adopter headaches, you get these constant, unmistakable glimpses of greatness. When you are multitasking in split screen, casting an app seamlessly from your phone, or dictating with Rambler, the vision for where Google is taking this software is clear, exciting, and genuinely fun to use every single day.
If you are looking for a completely polished, worry-free daily driver, you should definitely wait and see how Googlebook OS evolves over the next six to twelve months. But if you are like me and love being on the front lines of where technology is heading, there is something special brewing here. The foundation is solid, the potential is massive, and I am genuinely excited to see where it goes from here.
