Google 'Coral' spotted at AOSP and Geekbench: but what is it?

A potential mobile device named Google ‘Coral’ has landed on benchmarking website Geekbench (via MySmartPrice). The device was benchmarked yesterday apparently running Android Q with a Snapdragon 855 chipset and 6GB of RAM.

The Coral name also appears in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), where many Android devices and features have been spotted before their official announcements. What exactly it refers to, however, we don’t know.

Seemingly, this is not the rumored Pixel 3 Lite or Pixel 3 Lite XL, though. Google tends to choose fish for its smartphone codenames — like Sargo and Bonito, the rumored codenames for the Pixel 3 Lite phones. The Coral name suggests this is something slightly different.

MySmartPrice speculates it may be a Chromebook (possibly a new Pixelbook); if it’s running Android Q at launch, it may arrive around October with Google’s expected Pixel 4-series smartphones.

However, Qualcomm has dedicated chips for laptop-style devices such as the Snapdragon 8CX announced alongside the Snapdragon 855. Meanwhile, Google tends to use Intel chips for its Chromebooks. A Snapdragon 855-based Chromebook seems like an odd proposal.

What’s more, a look through the Geekbench database shows the Google Coral has been benchmarked hundreds of times with Intel Celeron chipsets and motherboards since 2017. This latest listing is the first time Coral has been used with a Snapdragon 855 and Android Q, and it looks like the first time with the “coral” motherboard. Whether this indicates that such a device is now on the way, though, we can’t say.

As for the results, the 3296 single-core score and 9235 multi-core score put the device give the device a significant edge over the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, which tend to score around 2300-2400 and 8300-8400 in the respective categories.

Google hasn’t commented on any of its upcoming devices so we’ll have to wait this one out for now. What do you think of the speculation? Let me know in the comments.