ASUS may be prepared to step where Lenovo has already gone with a new Chrome OS tablet, complete with support and keyboard cover. Intelligence suggests that the so-called Chromebook Flip device may have almost the same spec footprint as last year’s Duet. And in fact, in the few places where things were different, this new tablet could get bigger and better.
The photos we are sharing here and the specification lines come from the German retailer Saturn, as collected by Chrome Unboxed – this publication suggests that other sources have extra information – and tell a strange story.
The so-called CM3000 – apparently codenamed Saturn – uses MediaTek’s MT8183 processor, which in itself is a reheated version of the Lenovo Duet Helio P60T, as both feature four Arm Cortex-A73 cores and four A53 cores with all of them capable of maximum clock speed of 2GHz.
The diagonal of the screen gains 0.4 “with no change in resolution, but results in a larger and more massive overall footprint. ASUS also found that it could afford a 3.5mm audio connector here and designed the keyboard cover with its soft touch fabric surface to attach magnetically to the tablet – like Microsoft Surface convertibles and unlike the Lenovo Duet. The only sore point for the CM3000 is back with the screen, as its maximum brightness of 320 nits seems to underperform to Duet’s 400 nits.
Otherwise, the rest of the sheet aligns.
We’re a little less sure about Chrome Unboxed’s inclusion of this image in its media package, which suggests that the tablet comes with a silo for a pen included, especially since one of the oblique profile photos hosted on Saturn includes a clear view of the full top edge of the device with no visible port where the pen would be. That said, we are not excluding the possibility that a pen has a suitable fit on the keyboard cover and is included in the sale.
As it stands, the Saturn floated a price of € 449 as a placeholder, but when you consider that a similarly charged Lenovo Duet sold for $ 279 at launch, we thought it best to leave it open.
