ASUS is prepping a new tablet to follow up the Chromebook CM3 detachable

As we head into the latter parts of 2023 and begin looking towards what is on the horizon, we obviously have to talk about Chromebook Plus and the devices that should be showing up soon that bear the branding of Google’s latest Chromebook category. But beyond that next big step, there’s another batch of Chromebooks set to hit the market either near the end of the year or first thing in 2024: new tablets.

For many reasons, I’m excited to see a new wave of Chromebook tablets. Primarily, my excitement and anticipation rests most on those that are being built on the ‘Geralt’ baseboard. With the MediaTek MT8188 inside, my hopes are high that we’ll finally get Chromebook detachables that are fast, smooth, long on battery, and able to be desktop-capable as well.

But there’s another, smaller group of tablets that I think could do quite well, too, and those are the ones that will be based on the new MediaTek Kompanio 520 (MT8186). This SoC is the follow-up to the processor inside the original Lenovo Chromebook Duet and ASUS Chromebook CM3 Detachable. Though the Kompanio 500 had some performance issues, we’ve already seen the 520 in action on two devices here in the office (the Lenovo Slim 3 and the ASUS CM14 Flip); and while I wouldn’t categorize either of those devices as fast, I think the Kompanio 520 is plenty adequate for most Chromebook tasks you’d want to accomplish on a tablet.

An ASUS Kompanio 520 tablet is inbound

Now, let’s talk about the latest Chromebook tablet with the Kompanio 520 that is inbound. We found ‘Starmie’ back in May and at the time, the board it was being developed alongside – ‘Staryu’ – was assumed to be a more-standard Chromebook. Though evidence was clear that ‘Starmie’ was set to be a detachable, I’d not yet found the commits that show ‘Staryu’ as being a tablet as well. Thinking this was going to be a tandem of a convertible and a tablet device, my mind immediately went to ASUS and their CM3 Chromebooks that came in both a convertible and detachable configuration.

Well, my assumptions were close, but not quite what I thought. As you can see from the commits above, ‘Staryu’ is also a tablet and as it turns out, it is the first of the pair to get a keyboard variant already in development in the Chromium Repositories. The keyboard for ‘Staryu’ is called ‘Jewel’, and once I dug into the provide specs on the trackpad layout for ‘Jewel’, I noticed a striking similarity to another Chromebook tablet: the ASUS CM3 Detachable.

Note the two highlighted sections above and notice that the specs across the board are completely and utterly identical. For reference, ‘Moonball’ is the keyboard that belongs to the ASUS Chromebook CM3 Detachable, so you can quickly put the pieces together and solidly speculate that both ‘Jewel’ and ‘Staryu’ belong to ASUS. And then I found the clearest connection of all for ‘Starmie’ and ‘Staryu’ to ASUS: a commit for ‘Starmie’ with ASUS email addresses attached to it.

So then, what exactly is ‘Starmie’? I’m not quite sure at this point. My earlier assumption made me think it would be the follow-up to the ASUS CM3 Detachable, but that clearly seems to be the future for ‘Staryu’ and not ‘Starmie’ right now. Perhaps the main development board for this entire project is ‘Straryu’ and the actual device itself is ‘Starmie’, but it simply isn’t clear at this point. The two are clearly related to one another, but more research and more development will need to happen before I can discern which is which. As more details emerge, we’ll be sure to keep piecing things together and trying to figure out exactly what sort of tablet (or tablets) we should be expecting from ASUS in the coming months. Stay tuned.