Samsung is working on a QLED Chromebook ‘Nightfury’

Samsung has been deeply involved in Chromebook manufacturing since the onset of Chrome OS. Their Series 5 Chromebooks were among the first generally available Chrome OS devices on the market and their flimsy-but-affordable Series 3 Chromebook is responsible for my initial interest in Chromebooks to begin with. Remember the For Everyone ad campaings? If not, that’s OK. You just need to know that Samsung has been a Chromebook maker for as long as there have been Chromebook makers, so it isn’t odd to see them be the first to bring something to the ecosystem.

As a matter of fact, Samsung was the first to really introduce proper pen support in a Chromebook, the first to build an affordable Chromebook in the Series 3, the first to make a convertible Chromebook with Chrome OS’ fledgling (at the time) tablet mode in the Samsung Chromebook Plus, the first to use an ARM chip in a Chromebook, and the first to launch with a 4K AMOLED screen in the Galaxy Chromebook that arrived earlier in the year. That’s a lot of firsts and breakthroughs from a company that doesn’t focus much on overwhelming the competition with variety in this space. Instead, innovation in Chromebooks is what Samsung is after.

A quick bit about QLED displays

In that spirit, it looks like Samsung is working on bringing their latest display tech over to Chrome OS, too. While the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook’s standout feature is clearly the brilliant 4K AMOLED screen it wields, this type of display tech isn’t Samsung’s latest bread and butter. Instead, Samsung’s favorite display tech at the moment is QLED that was first introduced at CES 2019 for use in televisions. While not as punchy and contrasted as AMOLED panels, QLED has the ability to get much brighter and has better support for HDR across the board. Additionally, QLED is far less expensive to produce than OLED panels and can be produced in far larger televisions at a much lower price than OLED can.

While QLED is still basically a good old LCD screen and is in many ways inferior to OLED, it is a huge step up from standard backlit LCD screens we usually see on laptops. Apart from the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, all Chromebooks use some form of LED backlighting on their LCD screen. Most TVs you see use LCD as well and, up until just the past couple years, most phones did too. OLED is expensive to produce. Sure, it is better at most things than other display types (you can read a very deep dive about OLED vs. QLED here), but you pay for it. Right now, if you look up an 80+ inch OLED TV at Best Buy, you’ll find prices between $19K and $30K. For similarly-sized QLED TVs, however, that price range falls sharply down to $3K – $4K. Sure, QLED might not be quite as full-range as OLED, but I can tell you that it isn’t worth 10x as much at the register for the upgrade.

QLED is coming to a Samsung Chromebook soon

Now that you know a bit more about QLED and it’s standing as a current display tech, the important part is that it is on the way in Samsung’s latest Chromebook effort: ‘Nightfury’. We’ve talked a bit about ‘Nightfury’ before, but what we’ve yet to really get our heads around is exactly what Samsung is up to with this one. If you read that earlier post from February, ‘Nightfury’ is clearly a Samsung device and is based on the same 10th-gen Comet Lake ‘Hatch’ board as the existing Galaxy Chromebook. When it was added in February, it was a real head-scratcher since Samsung had just blown us away with the Galaxy Chromebook at CES 2020.

This commit we just found today gives us what could be a bit more understanding about this new device, though. If you look at the variant.c file within, you’ll see this portion:

const char *mainboard_vbt_filename(void)
{
	uint32_t sku_id = google_chromeec_get_board_sku();

	if (sku_id == 2)
		return "vbt-nightfury-qled.bin";
	else
		return "vbt.bin";
}

Pay special attention to the sku_id == 2 as it points to a variation of this upcoming device that will come with a QLED screen. We’ve been seeing updates to the display panel with ‘Nightfury’ but we’ve been unable to track down exactly what was being changed. Thanks to this file, it is clear that a variant of ‘Nightfury’ is definitely being tested with a QLED panel.

While we’re still trying to discern what that means for Samsung in this space, one thing feels obvious: this new Chromebook from Samsung will still have one of the best screens on any Chromebook, but will clearly be using it as a cost-saving measure over the AMOLED screen that is currently selling in the Galaxy Chromebook. While I can’t say for certain, this sounds like a move towards something like a new Samsung Chromebook Plus. We saw the Plus v2 debut in late 2018, so a fall launch of a new version would make a whole lot of sense.

What would make zero sense is for Samsung to put out a model that is very similar to its existing Galaxy Chromebook with a lower price tag. As we saw in the examples from the beginning of this post, Samsung likes to push the envelope, not crowd the market. I don’t think ‘Nightfury’ will directly compete with the Galaxy Chromebook, but it could most definitely slot itself as Samsung’s mid-tier device for 2020 and, with a fantastic QLED panel inside, will likely sell quite well. We’re obviously continuing to dig up details on ‘Nightfury’ and as we uncover more, we’ll report it immediately. Make sure you are subscribed below so you don’t miss it.

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