Google just gave Chromebooks a big upgrade for free – 4 features you can use on ChromeOS nowKyle KucharskiFutureTools – The Latest AI and Machine Learning News

   The latest ChromeOS features debut alongside Lenovo’s new Chromebook Plus, which offers an OLED display, 16GB of RAM, and support for two external 4K displays. 

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Chromebooks are continuing to level up. Google just announced a host of new AI features live in ChromeOS now, along with the Lenovo Chromebook Plus, an all-new device with an OLED display, up to 16GB of RAM, and up to 17 hours of battery life — the most of any Chromebook to date.

Also: The best Chromebooks for students in 2025: Expert tested and reviewed 

I recently had a chance to go hands-on with the Lenovo Chromebook Plus at an event at Google’s New York campus, and was impressed with its sleek physical form, great-looking display, and attractive starting price of $649. 

Under the hood, Lenovo chose to go with the MediaTek Kompanio Ultra processor — the first Chromebook Plus to feature an Arm-based chip. It’s similar to what we saw last year with the 11-inch Chromebook Duet, but this device is significantly more powerful with up to 50 TOPS for AI-powered tasks, support for two external monitors at 4K, and Wi-Fi 7 — not to mention a suite of AI-powered features in ChromeOS.  

The display on the Lenovo Chromebook Plus is crisp and adequately bright at 400 nits and 1920 x 1200 WUXGA resolution. It’s not a 2-in-1, but it can come with a touchscreen, which will bring the price up to $749.

It also comes with AI-powered features that are unique to the device. First, you’ll be able to use “Smart grouping”, which allows ChromeOS to bring together similar browser tabs and documents based on their content. For those of us with several dozen browser tabs open at any moment, this could certainly be an organizational game-changer. 

Also: This lightweight laptop has one of the best displays I’ve seen – and it’s very affordable

Secondly, it comes with on-device image editing in the Gallery app, which lets you do common tasks like removing backgrounds, toning, and making stickers out of existing images. 

All in all, the Lenovo Chromebook Plus looks to be an exciting development for the lineup, bringing a new level of processing power, premium elements, and marathon battery life to the line, as well as Dolby-supported speakers, and a new level of practical power with multiple 4K monitor support. Personally, I’m looking forward to working with the device in a full-length review. 

But other Chromebook Plus devices are getting some love, too. Starting today, ChromeOS allows the user to invoke Select to search and Text capture for anything on your screen — just long-press the on-screen launcher button or hit the screenshot key. We first saw this feature on Android phones, and now brings the same Google search functionality to whatever you’re looking at on your Chromebook. 

Additionally, Google brought the Quick Insert (QI) key to Chromebook Plus devices last year as a sort of “all purpose” control panel that uses AI to determine what tool you’re looking for in any given situation. Now, it has the ability to generate images added to the list, allowing the user to invoke Gemini’s gen-AI with one key. 

We also just got the Simplify tool, which paraphrases and summarizes text selections into easy-to-digest sentences. This pairs well with the fact that NotebookLM — Google’s note-taking and organization software — now comes pre-installed on Chromebook Plus devices.

Also: Google’s new Chromebook Plus AI features could give Windows Copilot a run for its money

In addition to all of the above new features, new Chromebook Plus devices also come with a free year of Google AI Pro with Gemini pre-installed. This puts Google’s AI features front and center, further defining the use case of Chromebooks as lightweight, fast, and useful, with a streamlined OS.

Besides Lenovo’s Chromebook Plus, two additional Chromebooks are coming as well, including the Asus CX15 and CX14, as well as a new 14-inch HP Chromebook. We’ll be going hands-on with all of these soon, so stay tuned.