Chromebooks have almost always pursued the business model of delivering inexpensive devices in 11-inch and 13-inch variations, without much difference besides that. However, the Chromebooks are changing in 2015, with Acer Chromebook 15 breaking the mold as Asus has now come out with a convertible Chromebook called the Flip.

Tech Radar reports that the Asus Flip will be available later this Spring for $249 (approximately £167, AU$327), and is just as reasonably priced as any Chromebook. However, the Asus Filp sports a unique feature - its screen can be turned full 360-degrees to convert the device into a Chrome OS tablet. The screen of the Asus Flip is a 10.1 inch IPS panel rendering a 1280 x 800 resolution - a small increase from the conventional 1,366 x 768 resolution screen seen in most 11-inch machines.

As far as a convertible Chromebook is concerned, the Lenovo N20p certainly beats the Flip, but this device also comes with an all-aluminum chassis, measuring just 15mm thin and weighing less than two pounds.

For the computing aficionados, Asus opted for 4GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD and a fanless Rockchip 3288 CPU for the Flip. While this name may not be as familiar as Intel's Core M, it is an ARM chip rooted in a 32-bit quad-core Cortex 17 design. In theory, this 2GHz quad-core processor should be more than sufficient for Web browsing, while benchmarks from CNX-software have demonstrated that the Rockchip 3288 processor can run laps around an Intel Baytrail Atom processor.

In addition to the Flip, Asus is also coming out with an 11.6-inch Asus Chromebook C201, which will also be equipped with the same Rockchip 3288 processor. The new machine will go on sale at Amazon in May this year with a starting price of $169 (about £ 113, AU$221) for the 2GB version. It will also have a 4GB model.