It looks like you can make phone calls right on your laptop in the future
Chromebooks already integrate pretty neatly with phones, allowing you to see your notifications, recent photos, and battery status right in the Phone Hub living on the right side of the Chrome OS taskbar. As discovered by Chrome Unboxed, you might soon also be able to make phone calls right from your Chromebook — pretty similar to what Apple has long offered with Continuitiy on MacBooks and iPhones.
As spotted in a Chromium Gerrit entry, an upcoming flag called PhoneHubCallNotification will allow you to enable a so-called “Incoming/Ongoing call notification feature.” When digging deeper into the entry, it becomes clear that this functionality is supposed to be part of the Phone Hub, and the language surely suggests that you won’t only be able to see notifications, but that you’ll actually be able to take and make calls right on your computer: “Enables the incoming/ongoing call feature in Phone Hub.”
Chrome Unboxed speculates that this might be part of the upcoming Eche software bridge, a system tool discovered by Android Police that establishes a deep connection between Chromebooks and Pixel phones. Other than just allowing you to take phone calls, we also discovered that it will let you open phone notifications right on your Chromebook, with your handset’s screen mirrored to Chrome OS.
While phone calls might be a little further out, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google introduced the first few Eche features alongside the Pixel 6, giving its upcoming phone lineup yet another standalone feature.
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