Back in December, we reported on the appearance of ‘Dratini’ showing up in Geekbench results with some pretty massive hardware on board. With a 10th-gen Core i7 and 16GB of RAM, it was clear at that time ‘Dratini’ was set to be a top-tier variant of the ‘Hatch’ baseboard family of upcoming Chromebooks for 2020. Included in that family are devices like the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook and ASUS Flip C436, so if you aren’t already up to speed on this next generation of Chromebooks, those two should give you an idea of what we’re dealing with.
At the time this Geekbench result came out, we only presumed we’d also get a few variations with some lower specs and lower price points, but there was no evidence of that. Today we have some clear evidence that both ‘Dratini’ and ‘Dragonair’ (these devices are clearly related and likely made by the same manufacturer) will come in not only a Core i7 variant, but in 3 additional ones: Pentium, Core i3, and Core i5. You can see the Geekbench results for both ‘Dratini‘ and ‘Dragonair’ by following the links and it is clear that each of these variants could also ship with anywhere from 4GB of RAM to 16GB from what these test results show.
If you’ll recall back in October when Gabriel originally came across these devices, there are 6 variants (4 clamshells and 2 convertibles) in testing as shown in this commit:
Dratini:
– SKU ID 1: (Clamshell, HDMI)
– SKU ID 2: (Clamshell, KB_BL, FPS, HDMI)
– SKU ID 3: (Clamshell, TS, KB_BL, HDMI)
– SKU ID 4: (Clamshell, TS, FPS, HDMI)
Dragonair:
– SKU ID 21: (Convertible, TS, FPS, Stylus)
– SKU ID 22: (Convertible, TS, KB_BL, FPS, Stylus)
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As you can see in these shorthand terms, there are options for stylus, keyboard backlight (KB_BL), touchscreen (TS), convertibles, clamshells, and fingerprint sensors (FPS). Rest assured, there will be a few of these with every possible bell and whistle on board. The addition of the HDMI option makes us assume these devices will likely be aimed at the Enterprise sector as the only Chromebooks we’ve seen of late with a dedicated HDMI ports on board are the Dell Latitude laptops that were the first Chromebook Enterprise devices on offer.
With development of these boards dating all the way back to early October of 2019, I’d assume we’ll see both ‘Dratini’ and ‘Dragonair’ make an appearance at Google’s yearly Cloud NEXT conference that is happening in early April. Last year, they teased what we now know as the Pixelbook Go in one of the side chats, so it would make sense that these new devices – geared towards enterprise and IT – could make their appearance there as well. We’ll be keeping an eye out for sure.
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