Upcoming detachable Chromebook from Samsung will come with an S-Pen

Development started in September so unlikely to debut at CES



According to Chrome Unboxed, Samsung is preparing to launch a new detachable Chromebook codenamed “Nautilus,” which will come with a stowable stylus.

Editor's Pick Samsung Chromebook Pro review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFvrDUZwLCI Samsung took the wraps off two new additions to its Chromebook line at CES 2017 that were built in collaboration with Google: the Chromebook Pro and the Chromebook Plus. There are a few special features that make …

It’s been almost a year since Samsung announced the Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Pro. Sporting an aluminium body with a high-resolution touchscreen, the Plus and the Pro redefined what sub-$600 Chromebooks can offer. On top of that, they both came with Samsung’s now-iconic stylus, the S-Pen. Now, the latest report claims that riding the success of those two laptops, Samsung is preparing to launch yet another Chromebook with S-Pen.

Chrome Unboxed first reported on the existence of Nautilus back in November: a yet-to-be-announced Kaby Lake-powered Chromebook which had the name Jongpil Jung in its repositories. The same name was attached to “Kevin” and “Caroline,” codenames for the Chromebook Pro and Chromebook Plus respectively, indicating that Nautilus is most likely to be a Samsung-made device as well.

Now, there is even more evidence confirming that the upcoming Nautilus Chromebook is manufactured by Samsung. The online publication states that the commit from Nautilus shows the following:

Nautilus has a PEN_EJECT signal that is routed to 2 CPU GPIO pins: B19: We need an input driver to use this to emit SW_PEN_INSERTED event. (This patch enables the B19 usecase).

B21: This is used for wakeup (configured by ACPI) Kevin uses gpio-keys driver to do this but the driver only understands device trees or platform data. Hence we instantiate the gpio-keys with the platform data. BUG=b:71329519

TEST=Verify that the “stylus tools” menu gets launched when I eject the pen on nautilus.

“PEN_EJECT,” “stylus tools,” and references to Kevin all indicate that Nautilus is indeed from Samsung and that it’ll feature a stowable S-Pen, similar to the Plus and the Pro. The development for Nautilus began back in September, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see it at CES this January, but we’ll keep you updated as we learn more about this upcoming Chromebook.