A new affordable wave of Snapdragon-powered Googlebooks is in the works

Up to this point, the narrative surrounding Qualcomm-powered Googlebooks has been dominated by ultra-premium silicon. Between the existing ‘Bluey’ baseboard family (built around the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus) and the upcoming ‘Calypso’ boards (spotted testing the next-gen Snapdragon X2 Elite), early ARM-based Googlebook hardware has clearly been aimed at the high end of the market.

However, a fresh batch of Chromium Gerrit commits and an early report from GbookHub reveal that Google and its hardware partners are officially spinning up a third Qualcomm family codenamed ‘Dougie’ – and it looks poised to bring Googlebook OS to much more approachable price points.

Meet ‘Dougie’ and ‘Bandit’

According to 27 recent work-in-progress commits uploaded to the Chromium Gerrit, engineers are rapidly laying the foundational firmware and coreboot plumbing for the ‘Dougie’ platform. And just this morning, a brand-new commit surfaced to create the very first variant board from this family, aptly codenamed ‘Bandit’.

If you have been following Google’s recent ARM hardware development, the naming convention here is an instant giveaway. Following the ‘Bluey’ baseboard family, both ‘Dougie’ and ‘Bandit’ continue the trend of naming Qualcomm-powered Googlebook boards after characters from the hit animated series Bluey.

A more affordable Snapdragon Googlebook?

What makes ‘Dougie’ especially interesting is how it is structured in the code. Rather than pulling from the existing Snapdragon X Elite or X2 Elite codebases used by ‘Bluey’ and ‘Calypso’, ‘Dougie’ is registered with its own distinct designation.

While the exact retail name of the processor isn’t explicitly spelled out yet, the commit history gives us some massive clues about where ‘Dougie’ and ‘Bandit’ will sit in the lineup:

• Entry-to-Mid-Range Silicon: Because high-end Snapdragon chips are already accounted for on other baseboards, ‘Dougie’ is likely built around the upcoming Snapdragon X2 Plus or Qualcomm’s entry-tier Snapdragon C series announced earlier this year.
• Flexible Storage Options: The Gerrit commits explicitly add support for eMMC alongside faster UFS and PCIe/NVMe storage. The inclusion of eMMC support in the Kconfig is a classic hallmark of a baseboard designed to scale down to budget-friendly or mid-range retail configurations.
• Wi-Fi Only: Code references indicate the absence of an integrated cellular modem on the SoC, meaning ‘Bandit’ and its eventual sibling devices will almost certainly be Wi-Fi-only laptops.

As much as we love testing these initial flagship laptops, the Googlebook ecosystem needs strong, battery-efficient mid-range hardware to truly take off for everyday consumers. With ‘Bandit’ officially branching off the ‘Dougie’ baseboard today, the race toward more affordable Snapdragon Googlebooks is fully underway.