Android-powered laptops are already showing a split personality.
The Verge has spent about a week with two new Android-powered laptops, one from Asus and one from HP. The good parts all trace back to Android itself: native versions of phone apps running on the laptop, and phone notifications popping up right in the laptop interface without extra setup. The bad parts trace back to getting phone and laptop to actually talk to each other. Phone connectivity is flaky, casting an app from phone to laptop is awkward, and file-sharing between the two devices is described as flat-out broken.
That gap matters more than it sounds. The headline feature of an Android laptop is supposed to be the phone-laptop link, not the Android apps on their own. If that link is the weakest part of the experience, the laptop is just running phone software with extra steps.
It is a familiar pattern: companies pitch seamless device integration in the marketing, then ship something closer to a beta. A notification tray is nice. A file transfer that actually completes is the bar.