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Asus predicted a March release date for their newest premium Chromebook and it appears they should be right on schedule if not early to the launch.
Our good buddy Kevin Tofel of About Chromebooks has uncovered the FCC filing for the ASUS Chromebook C434 which is a good indicator that it will be available, at least for pre-order, in the very near future.
Complete with user manuals and product test photos, the ASUS Chromebook C434 should be primed for a March release and I would not be surprised at all if you can reserve on before the end of the month. I’ll link the FCC reports at the end but keep in mind, the product photos are a development device. The black keyboard should be replaced with the soft white one we saw in our hands-on in Las Vegas.
The 8th gen Amber Lake Chromebook boasts the same Y-series processors found in Google’s Pixel Slate and will offer up to 128GB of storage in a 14″ device that produces a significantly smaller footprint than its competitors.
This is done by using what looks to be some of the smallest bezels we’ve ever seen on a Chromebook. While not truly edge-to-edge, the ASUS C434 touts an impressive 87% screen-to-body ratio.
Not-so-coincidentally, ASUS has debuted a new marketing video for the C434 and it looks like they pulled out all of the stops to feature the successor to the popular Chromebook C302.
Update: The YouTube video appears to have been taken down for unknown reasons but you can still check it out on ASUS’ Facebook page here.
This is exciting to see a company apart from Google spend this amount of resources on marketing for a Chromebook. We have been looking forward with great zeal to this device and I suspect, thanks to the C302’s popularity, the C434 will be a big hit for ASUS and this video tells me that they feel the same.
We are hoping to get the C434 in the office for a review ASAP so we can share our continued thoughts on the Chromebook but I’ll go ahead and tell you, I’m buying one. The size, the aesthetics and the overall tastiness the C434 is going to offer is everything I love in a Chromebook.
The ASUS C434 will start at the very competitive price of $569 for the Core M3 model and go up from there with the Core i7 version likely being around $999 if my gut is accurate. This Chromebook could very well set the pace for the Chrome OS market in the coming year and we are certainly hoping the bar remains high.
Shop ASUS On AmazonSource: FCC via About Chromebooks
