Following the leaked images of the faux leather cover of its purported Chromebook 2, Samsung had no choice but to make it official.
The Samsung Chromebook 2 can be considered "almost a laptop." The 13.3-inch version, which will sell for $399.99, has a 1920 x 1080 display and under the hood is an ARM-based Exynos 5 Octa chip paired with 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. The battery life of the 3.09-pound laptop is expected to last for around 8.5 hours. It will come in black or white.
The slightly cheaper 11.6-inch variant, which weighs 2.42 pounds, will have a sticker price of $319.99. It will also have an Exynos 5 Octa processor that clocks a blink slower, 4GB RAM, and 16GB of storage. The battery of this model will have enough juice for eight hours of standard use. The lower-end model will just come in Titan Gray.
"Since we introduced our first Chromebook in 2011, Samsung has been committed to continually developing our designs and features to meet our users' ever-changing needs, while staying true to the core Chromebook attributes of simplicity, speed and security, said Samsung Electronic America's SVP of consumer IT product marketing Mike Abary.
"Samsung has been the top selling consumer Chromebook brand for the past three years and we'll continue to grow our leadership position in this space with the launch of the Chromebook 2 Series," Abary added.
The Samsung Chromebook 2 will hit the shelves in April.
The announcement of the Chromebook 2 follows leaked images of the latest iteration of the Samsung Chromebook, which surfaced online over the weekend and showed that the Chrome OS-powered laptop has a lot of faux leather on it. The cover sports a black leather that will remind fans of the Galaxy Note 3.
On Sunday, professional device leaker @evleaks posted the alleged latest images of the Samsung Chromebook 2.
"Samsung's Galaxy Note 3 design language marches on," @evleaks posted.
The sneak peek showed what seems to be the portion of the lid of the laptop covered with black, textured leather with gray stitches around its edges. It also sports a Google Chrome logo.
The second image tweeted by @evleaks showed a good portion of the device, this time displaying the Samsung branding.
For those who are not familiar, the Galaxy Note 3 also features a soft-touch cover on the back. This is true as well for the Galaxy Tab and its Pro sibling unveiled at this year's International CES in Las Vegas.
Fan of faux leather or not, consumers need to live with the design that Samsung loves. The popularity of Chromebook, anyway, is partly due to the efforts of the manufacturer.
A lot of manufacturers have jumped into the Chromebook niche. Acer offers the affordable C720-2848 Chromebook for $200 that has an Intel Celeron 2955U that derived its DNA from the Haswell chip architecture.
Dell also has the Chromebook 11 with an 11.6-inch display that sells for $309 on Google's Chromebook page. Other manufacturers such as HP, Toshiba, and ASUS also have their own variants of the netbook.
As manufacturers show love for the Chromebook, Microsoft feels otherwise. It has launched a series of Scroogled campaign to discredit the line of laptops. In November, it tapped History Channel's "Pawn Stars" to spread the word that a Chromebook is not a real laptop and is essentially useless. Another punch was thrown in December when it sent Ben Rudolph, more popularly known as "Ben the PC Guy, in Venice Beach, California to talk to consumers and convince them that it is not the machine they need.
However, Microsoft's campaign against Chromebook might have backfired as Chromebook emerged as the best selling laptop on Amazon.
