ASUS’s competitor to the Lenovo Chromebook Duet looks finally breaks cover

With a nice bright screen and two kickstands, the ASUS Chromebook Flip CM3000 could be quite a flexible product.

What you need to know

• The unreleased new ASUS Chromebook Flip CM3000 has a live listing on German retailer Saturn.
• The tablet’s full specs are listed, including a MediaTek 8183 processor and 128GB of storage.
• The delivery dates listed aren’t until July, so we’re still months from being able to get the physical device.
• One oddity in the listing: there are product renders with two different magnetic kickstands: one landscape and one vertical.

As I’ve mentioned several times in the last year, the state of Chrome OS tablets right now is pretty sparse. You have the compact, affordable Lenovo Chromebook Duet, which has won not only a spot on Best Chromebooks but mine and my coworkers’ hearts as well, or you have a smattering of three-year-old Chrome OS tablets that are either discontinued, underpowered, or both.

We’d heard rumors of another Chrome OS tablet on the horizon, and it’s finally been outed by Saturn, a German electronics retailer. This live listing shows the full renders and specs for the yet-to-be-released ASUS Chromebook Flip CM3000, and while it’s not entirely groundbreaking, there are a few things to take note of here:

The MediaTek MT8183 has shown up in over a dozen Chromebooks and while it’s not uber-powerful, it’s enough to get the job done, and the 128GB of storage is very nice to see considering that, like the Lenovo Duet, there doesn’t appear to be a microSD slot on this tablet, just an audio combo jack and a single USB-C port. The ASUS is packing a garaged USI stylus, which the Duet lacked and will be very useful to those of us who like to doodle or take handwritten notes on our Chrome tablets.

One curiosity from this listing: there are two kickstands shown for the ASUS Chromebook Flip CM3000. One of these kickstands is the obvious landscape kickstand for using with the detachable keyboard, but the other is a vertical kickstand, which we can tell due to seeing the pogo pins for the keyboard and the camera rotated from the landscape kickstand. As someone who does a lot of reading on her Duet with it vertical, the idea that ASUS is including both of these in the box is almost too good to hope for. That said, considering that we use tablets for video calls more and more often these days, the extra few dollars to include both kickstands doesn’t sound too crazy to offer a truly all-in-one experience.

Speaking of dollars, the listing here is in euros and almost certainly isn’t an accurate representation of the price, since 449 euros would be roughly $540 and way, way too high for a MediaTek Chrome OS tablet. I’d bet ASUS releases the Chromebook Flip CM3000 closer to $350-$400 this summer. That’ll put it a little more expensive than the Duet, but with the garaged USI pen and the extra kickstand, I think ASUS can easily swing that.

Saturn listed the delivery dates as being in July and that would be the time to release a swanky new Chrome OS tablet amid the back-to-school frenzy. As soon as we can possibly get our hands on one, you know we’ll put it through the paces and see how it compares to our darling the Lenovo Chromebook Duet.

The best Chrome OS tablet — for now

Lenovo Chromebook Duet

• $299 at Best Buy (128GB)
• $249 at Walmart (64GB)

Part laptop, part tablet, all Chrome OS awesome.

With battery for literal days and the best experience we’ve seen from a Chrome OS tablet to date, the Duet finally gives us the kind of Google tablet we’ve wanted for a decade.