ASUS may be willing to step into where Lenovo has been before with a new Chrome OS tablet complete with stand and keyboard cover. Intelligence suggests the so-called Chromebook Flip device could have nearly the same specs as last year’s Duet. And in fact, the few places where things were different were this new tablet could come out bigger and better.
The photos we’re sharing here and the specs come from German retailer Saturn, as picked up by Chrome Unboxed – which publication suggests other sources have additional information – and they tell a strange story.
The so-called CM3000 – apparently codenamed Saturn – uses MediaTek’s MT8183 processor, which itself is pretty much a warmed-up version of the Lenovo Duet’s Helio P60T, as they mainly both have four Arm Cortex-A73 cores. and four A53 cores with all of them capable of a maximum clock speed of 2 GHz.
The screen diagonal gains 0.4 inches with no change in resolution, but it does result in a larger overall footprint and bulk. ASUS also found that it could afford a 3.5mm audio jack here and designed the keyboard cover with its soft-touch fabric surface to bond magnetically to the tablet – like Microsoft Surface convertibles do and unlike the Lenovo Duet. The only sore for the CM3000 is back with the screen, as the top brightness of 320 nits seems to underperform against the Duet’s 400 nits.
Otherwise, the rest of the sheet will line up.
We’re a little less sure about Chrome Unboxed’s inclusion of this photo in the media pack, suggesting that the tablet comes with a silo for an included stylus, especially since one of the Saturn-hosted angled profile photos clearly shows the full top edge of the device with no visible port where the pin would be. That said, we don’t rule out the possibility that a stylus would have a fitting housing on the keyboard cover and included with the sale.
As it is now, Saturn has listed a price of $ 449 as a placeholder, but when you consider that a similarly loaded Lenovo Duet sold for $ 279 at launch, we think it’s best up for debate.
