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We haven’t talked about the ‘Hatch’ family of Chromebooks that much in the past few weeks. After months of adding features, spinning off more devices in development, and generally being recognized as the torch bearer for the new generation of Chromebooks, we’re reaching the point where ‘Hatch’-based devices are nearing a release point. While we expected to see a couple before Black Friday, we’re assured we’ll be seeing more by CES in early January.
At this stage in development, finding new features and details about upcoming devices gets pretty difficult. The things getting tested on ‘Hatch’ devices these days are small tweaks and final changes, so we’re in this sort of limbo while we await a few product announcements. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing new happening, however, and today we have proof that ‘Hatch’ as a baseboard will be getting LTE support. Check out the language in this commit:
hatch: Add cellular SAR flags Add set-cellular-transmit-power-for-tablet-mode/set-cellular-transmit-power-for-proximity
set-cellular-transmit-power-dpr-gpio
Enable set-cellular-transmit-power-for-tablet-mode and assign dpr pin number
This is simply adding the necessary bits for the ‘Hatch’ baseboard to leverage LTE. The 10th-gen Intel Comet Lake chipset this baseboard is built on already contains all the necessary hardware to leverage wireless data: now we know they are going to actually be leveraging it.
It comes as little surprise with ‘Hatch’, honestly, because of what we already know about this baseboard at this point. It is a reference board for quite a few baseboards in development right now, including ‘Kohaku’ (Samsung), ‘Helios’ (ASUS), ‘Kindred’, ‘Kled’, ‘Akemi’, ‘Dratini’, ‘Dragonair’ and likely even more as time goes by. Along with that 10th-gen Intel Comet Lake chip set comes the option to add nearly every possible bell and whistle like stylus support, high-res screens, improved ambient light sensors, backlit keyboards, NVMe SSDs, Thunderbolt 3 support, Wifi 6, detaching keyboards, and convertible designs.
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With that type of feature set, any one of these Chromebooks could be the next king of the mountain, and we fully expect some fantastic experiences to be delivered by this new wave of Chromebooks in the coming months. Adding LTE to that mix of options only solidifies the notion that the ‘Hatch’ family of devices is going to set the pace for the next year of Chromebook development.
