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The highly-anticipated Tiger Lake Chromebooks have started to arrive. Just today, Acer unveiled four new Chrome OS devices and in the mix, two 11th Gen Intel Chromebooks that will take their places among the ranks of the most powerful Chrome devices on the planet. ASUS, however, was the first to market with a Tiger Lake Chromebook and the Chromebook CX5 has proven itself to be a worthy herald of this next generation of devices. That’s all fine and well but I’m still sitting over here anxiously awaiting ASUS’ other Tiger Lake device, the Chromebook CX9. I don’t care about having a convertible and this Chromebook will be a monster with a great screen and beautiful design.
Oddly enough, the 14″ 11th Gen Tiger Lake Chromebook has gone missing from its original landing page that debuted after its announcement. Each day, I check to see if it’s back in the hopes that we might discover a release date. This morning, the landing page was still absent but searching the model number revealed a new page on ASUS’ website that features the Chromebook in the “for-work” category. No surprise there. This thing is drop-tested, water-resistant, MIL-Spec rated, and aimed squarely at the enterprise user. What I wasn’t expecting was to see a new feature on the Chromebook that was previously not announced. A couple of the photos clearly display a NumberPad integrated into the trackpad. At first glance, we thought this could be a mistake on the part of the art department. Perhaps they used a comparable Windows model for the mockup and didn’t realize that the ASUS NumberPad was a PC feature.
Scrolling down the page, it became very apparent that this was not the case. As a matter of fact, ASUS went out of their way to point out the integrated NumberPad that can be used while still utilizing the trackpad. This not announced in the original release nor was the NumberPad present in any of the original landing page photos. This will be a huge add-on to what should be an already impressive device and will give power users the option to have a numeric keypad without having to upgrade to a 15.6″ device. This will be an industry-first for a Chrome OS device and brings us one step closer to Chromebooks being on parity with Windows laptops.
There is still no solid release date for the ASUS Chromebook CX9 but we have been given some information that leads us to believe that the Tiger Lake Chromebook should be arriving relatively soon. My hope is that we will see listings pop up at the beginning of June. In the meantime, you can check out the new landing page on ASUS’ website here. I’m stoked to get my hands on this device and I am 99.99% certain it will be my next Chromebook purchase.
