The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus may get adaptive screen colors

We’re likely only 11 days away from what I’m hoping will be one of the biggest and best comebacks in Chromebook history. I’m of course talking about the expected debut of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus (the name we’re going with until it is official) at Google’s upcoming Chromebook Showcase in New York City on September 24th.

We’ve uncovered quite a bit about this device, and it is primed to have lots of superlatives when it does arrive. One of those is the inclusion of what we’re thinking will be a 15.6-16-inch OLED screen. That’s a rarity in the Chromebook world, and only a few devices have equipped such a display. One of those is Samsung’s last, true big swing in the ChromeOS space: the Galaxy Chromebook.

A cool feature for the OLED panel

In what I’m thinking may be the final thing I uncover about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus before its official unveiling, I’ve stumbled upon a feature being worked on for the device that could have the OLED panel adjusting colors and temperatures based on the surrounding environment. Granted, these changes are specifically being made to impact the Night Light feature, but Chromebooks generally don’t use the ambient light sensor for this feature: you just use an adjustment slider to choose how warm you want the display to become.

While there’s a chance they use this tech only for Night Light, that would be a very strange move since there’s a simply adjustment there for users to make changes with. Instead, I’m hoping we’ll see ‘Xol’ ship with the ability to make subtle color temperature tweaks to the screen based on the environment.

We’ve seen something like this hinted at years ago for Chromebooks, but to my knowledge it’s never actually shipped in a device. Apple uses this sort of tech – dubbed True Tone – on many of its devices to this day from what I understand. The idea is your ALS (ambient light sensor) can read the colors of the room and adjust your display to blend in a bit better.

It’s a step beyond adaptive brightness, and when it works, it’s helpful for eye strain and comfort. On a phone, I don’t know how helpful that actually is. On a larger Chromebook display, however, I could see great benefit.

If the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus can basically read the room and adjust not only the brightness of the OLED screen, but also the warmth/coolness of the screen as well to better match the environment, I’d be very interested in this.

Again, this is something that is really cool when done well, and a bit disruptive when done poorly. I remember the early days of Apple rolling this out on iPhone and I had one of the first models True Tone debuted on (it was one of the few times I tried to dabble in the iPhone game). It frustrated me to no end because I’d end up with a super-warm screen a lot of the time and it just looked bad. At the time, I simply turned it off and moved on. From what I gather, it is far better these days.

Hopefully, whatever Samsung and Google are cooking up for this feature on the new Galaxy Chromebook Plus works well and adds yet another benefit to this device that I’m getting pretty excited for. 11 more days isn’t very long to wait, and I’m very much looking forward to finally seeing ‘Xol’ in the flesh.