At the ‘Learning With Google’ event that happened a few days ago, there was a ton of new information given about the work happening behind the scenes regarding Google services for the education sector. Michael covered arguably the largest changes happening for both teachers and students in the transition from G Suite for Education to Google Workspace for Education, but there was also a bit of news regarding new education-focused Chromebooks as well.
Google touts a whopping 40+ new Chromebooks on the way, and though they didn’t really highlight any of the specs of these new Chromebooks, they did show a few of them quickly rolling by on the screen. Some of these Chromebooks are already available, so it isn’t clear exactly what they meant by “new Chromebooks” for education. Either way, there will be a ton of new Chrome OS devices coming for schools to choose from this year, so we shouldn’t have any of the inventory issues we saw throughout 2020.
‘Limozeen’ makes an accidental appearance
As we all know around here, Chromebooks get developed with code names. We reference them often and every single Chrome OS device has some silly code name it goes by until it is officially unveiled. For example, we’ve been keeping tabs on ‘Nightfury’ for a year and only learned its real name – The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 – a few months ago.
In a similar way, we’ve been tracking ‘Limozeen’ as one of a handful of Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Chromebooks on the horizon. We got hands on with one of the others quite early in ‘Lazor’ and are highly anticipating ‘Coachz’ until it arrives, but these names are merely placeholders for development hardware until the Chromebook is ready to make a more public appearance. Check out what we see at 1:10:39 in the video below:
It seems that someone wasn’t paying terribly close attention for one of the upcoming Chromebooks presented in the video, and the code name was dropped right under it. Don’t be mistaken: this Chromebook will most definitely not be marketed by the name ‘Limozeen’. It is simply the Acer Chromebook 511 and will come to market as such. But at least we all know what this particular Chromebook development board is destined to become now, right?
With so many Chromebooks coming and such oddball model names that so often plague these devices, it was bound to happen eventually. For what it is worth, it is awesome to see at least one of these Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks get made for students and come in as an Always Connected Device with LTE under the hood. Qualcomm obviously makes lots of processors and SoCs with LTE as a part of the equation, so it makes sense to see this option show up for an education device. We’d also expect to start seeing LTE versions of upcoming MediaTek devices as well as the rest of 2021 unfolds. It’s going to be a very, very fun year.
