Asus is reportedly planning to launch a new Chrome OS laptop which is described as the company’s “most affordable Chromebook to date.”
Since Asus launched two Chromebooks priced at $249 last summer, that suggests the new Asus C201 Chromebook could have a list price of $199 or less.
OMG Chrome has posted an image of the upcoming Chromebook from the latest catalog of Troxell, a company that sells products to schools.
According to the catalog page the Asus C201PA Chromebook features a 1.8 GHz Rockchip RK3288-C processor, an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, 2GB (or 4GB) of RAM, and 16GB of eMMC solid state storage.
This wouldn’t be the first Chromebook to feature an ARM-based processor rather than an Intel x86 chip. But it would be one of the first models to feature Chinese chip-maker Rockchip’s quad-core ARM Cortex-A17 processor (which is pretty competitive with an Intel Atom Z3735F processor).
There’s no price listed in the catalog. Instead Troxell asks customers to contact the company for pricing. But I doubt the Asus C201 will be a Troxell exclusive, so it probably won’t be long before we start to see this laptop show up at retail outlets.
So far ASUS’ Chromebook offerings have been very disappointing. The C200 and C300 screens are by far the worst of any chromebook, and the performance has just been “eh.” I much prefer my Acer C720. Unless they’ve improved the screen quality greatly, even with the proposed price drop, I can’t see this machine doing well. A bad screen + even more hobbled processor = a poor effort on ASUS’ part.
Destined for sitting on a Walmart shelf. RK3288 has been benchmarked before… I don’t care if it gets 1 year of usage on a single charge. Shame on Asus.
Have you used one? Rk3288 is fast enough for basic browsing.
I’m a little hesitant to buy a Chromebook powered by anything this low-end. In my experience browsing in Chrome OS is not as resource-friendly as one might expect.
I have an Asus C300 (Celeron N2830) and it isn’t really that zippy. After loading a page, it is really laggy when I try to scroll down for the first several seconds.
Sometimes I load a page with 3-4 large GIFs (browsing imgur.com), and it takes about 7-10 seconds before the page is responsive in any way.
I have an N2840 powered Windows 8.1 laptop too, and it responds alot faster with web browsing. I’m not prepared to say that Chrome OS is a resource-hog, but my experiences have been poor on lower-end specs.
Rk3288 is around s600-s800 so it’s no slouch. With that said, if the extra $50 isn’t any issue, getting the Atom version is a better investment.
You dropped a ‘c’ in Rockchip in the title.