Samsung Notebook
Samsung Electronics will release a Chromebook equipped with its Exynos 5 Octa 5420 next year. It is a successor to the Exynos 5250 Chromebook that hit the market last year.
The Exynos 5 Octo 5420 is an application processor based on “big.LITTLE” technology and has four low-power cores (Cortex A7 1.3 GHz) and four high-performance cores (Cortex A15 1.8 GHz). The built-in graphics chip is a Mali-T628 of ARM. The product is expected to be priced at US$250-300.
The new Chromebook is likely to have an improved resolution of 2560×1600 with 3 GB RAM, a storage capacity of between 16GB and 32GB, and a screen of 12 inches or less. Also, it is predicted to support USB 3.0, have a built-in battery lasting for at least seven hours, and weigh slightly over 1 kg.
Industry insiders are expecting that Samsung Electronics will unveil the model at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show, but the company denied the possibility. “We are planning to unveil no laptops during the CES 2014 period,” said the company.
Chromebooks run on Google’s Chrome OS and use Google’s Web Office. Data is stored not on the devices but on Google’s cloud server, and thus neither large-capacity storage devices nor high-performance hardware components are required. The products, costing about half of an average laptop computer in general, are mainly used in developing countries for educational purposes.