Samsung’s next Chromebook may be a premium model with a 12.3 inch, 2400 x 1600 pixel touchscreen display and a 360-degree hinge that allows the notebook to become a tablet when the screen is tilted back.
But that’s just one of the things that makes the Samsung Chromebook Pro unusual. It may also be one of the first Chromebooks to feature support for digital pen input, and the convertible tablet is surprisingly compact for a model with a 12.3 inch screen: it measures 11″ x 8.7″ x 0.55″ and weighs 2.38 pounds.
Samsung hasn’t officially introduced the Chromebook Pro. But a series of leaks paint a pretty good picture of what we can expect from this upcoming convertible Chromebook. It should be available soon(ish) for around $499.
Like most new Chrome OS hardware, the Samsung Chromebook Pro should be compatible with Android apps when support for the Play Store for Chrome OS rolls out more widely. And Samsung knows a thing or two about using a digital pen with Android apps.
The Chromebok Pro will come with a pen and apps for drawing or painting, taking notes, or capturing and annotating screenshots.
The convertible laptop has an all-metal body, a touchscreen with edge-to-edge glass, and a display with 234 pixels per inch, a 3:2 aspect ratio, and 400 nits brightness level.
Other features include 4GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage, 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth, and a webcam. It also has an unspecified hexa-core ARMv8 processor with two ARM Cortex-A72 CPU cores and four ARM Cortex-A54 CPU cores.
Samsung’s promotional materials say the laptop should get up to 10 hours of battery life on a charge. And while the battery is not designed to be user replaceable, Samsung says its “Battery Life Extender” feature should mean the battery will still be good for up to 7 hours of usage at a stretch after 3 years.
Oh, there’s one other thing that makes the Samsung Chromebook Pro stand out: it’s one of the first Chromebooks I’m aware of that will ship with bloatware. Promotional materials say “a range of exciting software comes pre-loaded,” with no mention of whether you can easily un-load it.
On the bright side, you also get a one-year, ad-free subscription to AirDroid, which is a pretty useful service for interacting with an Android device through a PC, or in this case, a web browser.
You can find a product page for the Samsung Chromebook Pro at Adorama, which shows a $499 pre-order price for the laptop.
While Adorama doesn’t show a ship date, Chrome Unboxed notes that B&H also had a product page for the laptop. That page has been taken down, but when it was up it showed an estimated ship date of October 24th. There’s no way to know if that’s accurate.
