Chrome OS Detachable Devices Coming Soon?

Some fun food for thought this Monday morning.  There is a new commit in the Chrome OS source that points to a detachable UI design.  In other words, a detachable tablet-like Chrome OS device.  The commit was found by the team over at Chrome Unboxed and the top lines of the change says it all:

poppy: adding DETACHABLE_UI config option Create CONFIG_DETACHABLE_UI option for depthcharge. Will work in conjunction with USE flag in depthcharge ebuild.

While there isn’t a whole lot know about Poppy, this appears to be the first committed change to Chrome OS for a detachable device.  That would give users a wealth of usability options that we can see today in some of the Windows 10 based devices.

The good news here is that the change is committed, so it is real.  The not-so-clear part of this is when.  When will such a device be available?  That is hard to answer but 2017 could be the year.  Given the step up we have seen from Samsung on their new Chromebooks and Google’s push for Android apps going forward, having a Chrome OS-based slate makes a lot of sense.  Clearly Google is pushing the platform hard this year and this would fit in nicely with it.

You can read the full commit here and see what you think.  Do you like the idea of a Chrome OS slate?

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