What is "EVE", who is designing it, who is building it and what does it portend?Six months ago, I joked about MS and Qualcomm tossing some Chromekiller BS down on Google by firing off some fictional pure poot style "flaming bullets" made of purely imaginary brown vapor ..... and eventually getting back some irritated return fire from Google with some for real flaming bullets (or return phaser fire, as the case might well be).
Bang !!!! EVE flies out of the barrel aimed right at Wincom's nuts.
EVE is the platform name going through LENARO and Linus's kernel level commits and is now showing up in FCC reference designs. EVE keeps making the tech news as being the first to incorporate "lower cost new super fast main memory" and being the first to use several other technical innovations like a new stylus.
Historically, EVE was the mother of a new race. Might this portend something on the techie front as well ???
We know EVE is a new Chromebook type, that much is very clear.
EVE already has had some cutting edge modern mobile tech showing up in it, a behind the screen finger print sensor, a high pixel count touch screen, a layout task bar and the rest of the modern phone features INCLUDING your choice of having Google Assistant being live at all times, with it started up by by verbal or touching a dedicated key/screen button.
Google has always works in partnership with a builder/vendor as they incorporate builder feedback into the base design, always.
In this case the EVE system commits are coming from Google Chrome Central and also from the individual builder(s) .....
(drum roll please) HP (very heavy flow of commits)
Dell (heavy)
Acer (heavy)
Asus (light)
Lenovo (light)
These are the same laptop folks who will also build you a MS Chromekiller unit, and they see no conflict with this as they are most interested in just selling more stuff, the more stuff they can sell the merrier.
These laptop guys always do one of each kind so they are covered no matter which way the market eventually swings.
By doing EVE at the exact same hardware level as Chromekiller, the builder vendors will minimize their developmental expenses and increase their purchase quantities on the components, thus saving some additional coins.
Google doesn't try to stop this behavior as they want to quickly improve what they make to make it BETTER than the other stuff, so Google wants to take market share by EARNING it ongoing
with a lower cost better performing product. Working with the enemy camp members gets them completely detailed information much quicker so they can work around any advantages that are seen.
So far Google is meeting all the fancy stuff that MS has vapor pooted and added some more nice ones from the mobile world. As the two companies "feature fight" I look to see a comprehensive set of features in both top end glory products, features which will then slide down-hill into the general population of chromebooks over time.
The last 2 waves of Chromekillers came out with an exact Same Same chassis and unit design swinging both Win 8 and ChromeOS, so some very early head to head comparisons were quick and easy to get.
So far folks have spotted lots of new fast NVMe super memory, Gigabyte Wifi and state of the art tower service radios, a Kaby Lake Core i7 processor, Google Assistant button and a finger print scanner.
Kinda upscale, and equipped with other ritzy cell phone stuff. But hey, if that is the ball field this Chromekiller game is going to be played out upon, then let the fun commence.
Eve isn't going to be low end or inexpensive, it smells more like a multi-branded Pixel level device right now. We knew the Chromekillers were never going to get down to Chromebook pricing levels, so having EVE be price neutral (but having ass kicking better performance levels at the same cost) is how Google plans to play this one.
There will be more pedestrian versions of this Chromebook later on, I am sure. A lot of the successful ritzy neat features will move downstream into these lower cost units, so the Pixel exercise is always worthwhile for those who can afford it.
..... what I don't see is any Qualcomm 835 processors showing up anywhere ..... nor do I see any Samsung visible at the moment .....