Asus begins selling its first LTE Chromebook for $200 on a two-year Verizon contract

It’s not the first LTE Chromebook, but it’s the first from Asus to offer cellular connectivity with sales of the device quietly kicking off at Best Buy and other retailers late last week. Asus doesn’t appear to have made an official announcement, but an LTE version of the C300 Chromebook variant is now selling through Best Buy according to an announcement sent over from Altair Semiconductor, the company providing the LTE chip for the Chromebook:

Altair Semiconductor, the world’s leading developer of high-performance, single-mode LTE chipsets, today announced that ASUS, a worldwide top-three consumer notebook vendor, has selected Altair’s LTE chipset for a new Chromebook… While Wi-Fi is a standard feature, 4G LTE has only recently been introduced to Chromebooks.  Altair’s FourGee-3100/6202 LTE chipset, certified to run over Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE network, provides ASUS Chromebook users with a 100Mbps broadband internet connection.

The new Chromebook has specs similar to the company’s other C300 model Chromebooks from including a 13.3” display, 2.16GHz Intel Celeron processor (N2830), 2GB of RAM expandable to 4G, and 16GB of built-in storage. Additional specs include 1 USB 3.0 port, 1 USB 2 port, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a built-in mic and webcam.

Other new C300 models, which are largely the same as previous generations apart from new blue and red colour options, are also available to preorder (minus LTE) through Amazon. 

Best Buy is selling the new LTE C300 Chromebook for $199 on a two-year contract through Verizon.