14 DAY TRIAL // Today we've talked about the possibility of seeing Chromebooks running on the Intel Broadwell platform sometime in 2015.
While we wait on that, Toshiba has taken the opportunity to refresh its Chromebook lineup with a new model. The newcomer is called CB30-007, and at first glance, you might mistake it for the model that was rolled out last year.
That’s because the difference lies tucked away under the notebook’s hood. With this new version, Toshiba has removed the Intel Celeron 2955 Haswell processor and replaced it with a lower-power Intel Celeron N2830 Bay Trail chip.
The new model was spotted in a retail listing in Australia, and for the time being, we don’t know whether Toshiba plans to roll out the CB30-007 model in Europe and US as well, but it probably will at some point.
You might have noticed that Bay Trail Chromebooks are becoming quite mainstream these days. ASUS has two models, Acer has one and HP will soon roll out one. So if everybody is doing it, Toshiba saw no reason to not join the party as well.
Apart from the new processor, the Toshiba Chromebook CB30-007 should ship out to adopters with pretty much the same specs as before. It has a 13.3-inch display with 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, 2GB of RAM (note RAM is not upgradable) and 16GB of internal storage.
Other specifications include USB 3.0 port, USB 2.0 port, SD card reader, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and 44Whr battery which should last up for 10.5 hours of life.
The laptop is quite light, as it weighs 3 lbs / 1.3 kg, so you’ll be able to carry it around without straying yourself too much.
For the time being, we can’t tell you what the Chromebook's prices will be in the US, but it appears Toshiba will be offering it at the same price as the Haswell model, which is a tad strange.
Anyway, given the fact that the IFA 2014 will start in Berlin next week, we expect to see the company bring the device to the trade show.
We haven’t heard a lot about Toshiba lately new products-wise, but the device manufacturer might be willing to let us take a look at one of its latest Ultrabooks, the Kira 102 and its latest Encore tablets with Windows 8.1 with Bing.
Check back with us next week to see what are the latest products available from Toshiba, as we will be on the grounds at IFA 2014.
