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For those of you who have been following along with the site for some time, a Chromebook with the codename of ‘Cave’ shouldn’t be unfamiliar. Likely, though, there will be many of you who have never been here, so we’ll talk about what has been found today and talk a bit about what has been found up until now, and try to put together the pieces.
Thanks to our friends over at Notebook Italiana, and followed up by Chrome Story we received news of this device breaking cover early this morning. According to the FCC filings and a few early listings here and here, ASUS is set to launch a new convertible device with some really sweet confirmed specs. Here’s what we’re seeing so far:
- Skylake m3-6Y30
- 8GB RAM
- 32GB Internal Storage
- 12.5″ Screen IPS
- 360-degree hinge
- Aluminum Build
- 2 USB Type-C ports
- Micro SD slot
- Backlit Keyboard (we’ll talk about this below)
Some of those things (ports, build, hinge) come from the FCC filing. Those parts are pretty certain from photos. Keep in mind, the FCC is only concerned with antennas and such, so things like memory, storage, and screen are secondary. The details on processor, screen, storage, etc. are all coming from listings that have this device for sale already.
We’re Still Uncertain On Some Things
First, we’re pretty sure this is ‘Cave’ based on all we’ve found over the past months. You can read more here. ‘Cave’ has been in development since June and the timeline fits. We’ve been tracking it a bit longer than ‘Kevin’ (or as most know it, the Samsung Chromebook Pro). Almost everything we know about ‘Cave’ all fits here, so we are pretty confident.
One issue we have: one of the listings above show the device to have a FHD 1080p screen. It certainly looks like a 16:9 screen (for those who love that layout, this is welcome news), but the resolution doesn’t line up with what we’ve seen in development. We broke back in September that ‘Cave’ will have a High-Res screen. 1080p has been deemed ‘standard’ by the Chromium developers at this point, so the clear sign that ‘Cave’ will be High-Res means one of two things: we’ll see this device as a High-Res version (like the HP Chromebook 13 G1) or it is not ‘Cave’. We are leaning towards the former, assuming ASUS may have some variations on offer here.
Another unconfirmed but likely spec is a backlit keyboard. In the commits for ‘Cave’ we see reference to this feature. Though not specified in what we have before us today, the color of the keys makes us quite certain we’ll see a backlit keyboard. The silver on silver look usually is applied when backlighting is present. For reference, just take a look at the Microsoft Surface Book.
Another interesting, unconfirmed piece of news is the release. The first retailer listed above shows the device as ‘in-stock’ on November 1st. If that is to be believed, we’ll know everything about this device very, very soon.
Exciting times! We’ve included a little gallery of the FCC pics below.
