Samsung Galaxy Book S takes a stab at all-day laptops
Laptops
Well this is a familiar situation to find myself in.
I'm Dan Ackerman and this is a laptop.
This is the new Samsung Galaxy Book S and when I arrived here at Samsung Unpacked expecting to see new phones, several people said to me, Dan you're here.
Does that mean they're going to have a laptop?
I said, no I'm just here to see the phones and stuff.
But lo and behold, big surprise, they actually did have a laptop.
So, goes to show you what I know.
And it's not just or any laptop.
This is one of a very small breed of laptops that run Windows but not with Intel processors.
It's a special hybrid almost the phone leading the laptop because it runs it at a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor instead.
Now that lets you do some very interesting things.
Very power efficient, it can have basically instant on, almost like your phone can just turn on in a flash, because it's running a very phone-like chip underneath it.
It can just stay in a sleep mode, wake up, you don't have to worry about power management too much.
And that means they clean it can run for about 23 hours on a single charge.
And that's obviously a lot longer than even the longest lasting standard Windows Intel based laptop.
Now we've all of this sounds kind of familiar.
It's because we have heard of this before, just not little while A couple of years ago Qualcomm came out and said they were going to start working with a whole bunch of PC makers to make essentially this type of product, the body of a laptop and the brains of a smartphone.
Qualcomm, Snapdragon plus Windows and a Laptop form factor.
Now, the Asus NovaGo is one of those.
HP had a version.
Lenovo had a version.
And they all were pretty decent.
They all pretty much did what they said they were gonna do.
They did last a long time.
Nobody really hit close to that 24-hour mark.
But you'd had some compromises, and for what they charge for those which were more than Chromebooks.
Even though the body is realizing Chromebooks, but the price was a little more than you'd expect to pay for something that wasn't an Intel powered Windows laptop that fell a little bit short, I'm not gonna lie.
We found the performance in the other Snapdragon laptops and a few years ago, to be a little on the sluggish side and this combination of arm plus windows I wouldn't say it was buggy enough, but there were enough incompatibilities, just not everything you expect to work with Windows software-wise, services-wise worked on this arm platform.
99.5% of it is but the 0.5% that didn't happen to be some of the stuff that I wanted to do.
So we found there were some compatibility issues there as well.
So they had the high price, low performance, battery life was really good but did not live up to the crazy hype.
So nobody made one of these for a couple years.
You saw the first wave and that was it.
So now Samsung is back here with their version, the galaxy book S. Now on paper it sounds really familiar.
It's got a full HD screen.
It's super thin.
This one is about two pounds and it really does look very premium.
And it's got a new generation of Snapdragon processor.
So we are gonna have to wait until we can get this thing in our lab, start testing it to see if the latest version of arm powered laptop succeeds where the earlier generation fell short.
And they're inaccurate and that is the Samsung Galaxy book S.
