Samsung Chromebook 2
Credits: Samsung

Just a few days before CES 2021, Samsung has decided to drop a surprise for its customers, and has introduced the newest member of its computing family. The South Korean tech giant has updated last year’s Chromebook, announcing the Chromebook 2, which not only is substantially cheaper than its predecessor but also features a better battery life.

This time around, Samsung is using a 13.3-inch QLED display with a 1,920×1,080-pixel resolution which is found in some of Samsung’s Windows 10 laptops instead of last year’s 13.3 inch 4K-resolution AMOLED display. The company claims that this new display is capable of producing over a billion different colors and also said that every visual on this display is vivid and bright.

This new edition to the still nascent market of Chromebooks will be available in two versions with Intel 10th-gen Core i3-10110U or Celeron 5205U processors.

Samsung says that the 13.9 mm Chromebook will come in two colors- “vibrant Fiesta Red and timeless Mercury Gray”. It would cost $550 for the Celeron model which comes with 4GB of memory and 64 GB of storage. The price of the Core i3 model is expected to be around $700 which will have twice memory and storage. It will also have two USB-C ports, a headphone jack, a microSD card slot, and a backlit “all-new lattice keyboard with wider keycaps”. However in this new variant, mainly to cut cost, Samsung has left out its S Pen and the world facing camera.

The Chromebook 2 will feature a Smart AMP sound that produces sound 178% higher than normal amplifiers, placing the viewers at the center of the action. The company advertises this new Chromebook to be a combination of mobile theatre, creative canvas, and smart notebook and says this is a perfect fit for everyone from serial streamer to the budding artist.

Running on Google’s Chrome OS, the new laptop would let users seamlessly multitask. Not only do users get to use Google’s applications like Drive, Play Store, and Assistant, they also get access to the entire Galaxy ecosystem.

Shoneel Kolhatkar, General Manager, Head of New Computing, Samsung Electronics America said, “Many kids grew up using Chromebooks in school, and as they enter the workforce, their needs evolve, they’re looking for premium, powerful hardware that can elevate that intuitive Google experience. We designed the Galaxy Chromebook 2 with these users in mind, taking the popular features from Galaxy Chromebook—incredible visuals, great specs, and gorgeous design and color—and bringing them to a wider base of customers.”