4 handy Chromebook upgrades Google didn’t mention in its I/O keynote
Google has solved a fundamental problem with Chromebook gaming in a rather awesome way: How do you play Android touch games on Chromebooks without a touchscreen? For a long time, the answer was simply: you don’t. But Google has come up with a way to remap keyboard inputs to touch controls, for every game in the Google Play Store, along with several other helpful Chromebook tweaks.
For whatever reason, Google left out ChromeOS and Chromebooks entirely from its keynote at Google I/O, which included AI-powered search enhancements and some rather interesting AI tweaks to Gmail. But in the ongoing debate over whether to buy a laptop or a Chromebook, factoring in the most recent advances to Chromebooks matter. This week, Google executives offered up a sneak peek of the cooler new Google technologies coming in the future.
Google calls this Game Controls. The technology was first shown off in 2022 on a limited set of titles, according to Emilie Roberts, developer relations engineer for Google. But it’s been revamped with a better editor, and broader coverage across all of the apps in the Play Store. Game Controls is being tested in ChromeOS m125, currently in beta, and will be released to the stable channel “soon,” she said.