Dell is likely at work on a Snapdragon-powered Chromebook of its own

Over the course of the last couple years, tracking Chromebooks in development has become a much more elaborate affair. Where we used to see a device here and a device there, the truth is there are so many Chromebooks in development at this moment that we now have a frequently-updated post just to house them all. If that’s not enough, we also have far more processor options to keep tabs on as well, with devices now having the option of Intel’s big core and small core processors, AMD’s Ryzen and A-series chips, MediaTek’s 8183 or 8195, and now Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7c. It’s a lot to keep up with.

What is ‘Pompom’?

Discovered not long ago, ‘Pompom’ is one of a handful of new Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Chromebooks like the one we’ve already had a bit of time with in the Acer Chromebook Spin 513. ‘Pompom’ arrived on the scene in June of this year as an offshoot of ‘Trogdor’ – better known as the main baseboard all of the Snapdragon Chromebooks will be built from.

We don’t yet know a ton more about this device aside from the fact that it will be getting a unique update that will move the search key to a ‘new location’ on the keyboard, but we are a bit unsure exactly what that entails or why this particular change is even happening in the first place.

Unlike the ‘Coachz’ variant of ‘Trogdor’, we see no signs of ‘Pompom’ being a detachable or tablet, so it is more likely we’ll be getting another convertible device with this Chromebook. However, as more work gets done, we tend to find more out about these development Chromebooks, and today we have a nice, new tidbit to share about ‘Pompom’.

‘Dude, you’re getting a Dell!’

Based on some emails we’re beginning to see crop up for ‘Pompom’, we’re ready to go ahead and say that it looks like this new ARM Chromebook will be made by none other than Dell. Based on the work being done on this board by WeiHung Hsu, it is reasonable to assume ‘Pompom’ will show up sometime in 2021 bearing a Dell logo on the front or back.

WeiHung Hsu is only on a handful of commits in the Chromium Repositories, and it turns out all of those commits are for Dell-made Chromebooks. With credits on both ‘Sarien’ and ‘Drallion’ (the current and former Dell Latitude Chromebooks for enterprise), this name and email show up only on ‘Pompom’ in addition, making a pretty clear-cut cast that if WeiHung Hsu is involved, this device is almost 100% being manufactured by Dell.

The bigger question is how Dell will spin the device. Will this be an enterprise-focused effort? After all, we don’t see WeiHung taking part in devices like ‘Deltaur’ and ‘Deltan’ that we have a firm suspicion are Dell-made as well, so there’s a good chance that WeiHung’s involvement could point to ‘Pompom’ being an enterprise Chromebook like the Latitude Chromebooks we mentioned above. For now, we’ll just keep digging in to see if we can find more info about ‘Pompom’ and I’m hoping Dell decides to market this one as both a consumer and an enterprise Chromebook like Acer is doing with the Spin 513. We’ll know more in the coming months.