First revealed to the world last August, Samsung’s ready to unleash its latest super-thin Windows 10 laptop on the world. The Galaxy Book S will be hitting Australian retailers from January with a price tag of $1,699.
Samsung’s Galaxy Book S draws a lot of inspiration from mobile phone technology. It’s got 4G connectivity (Gigabit Cat.18 LTE), for one, but it’s hewing towards the thin-and-light end of the market, and this makes it pretty special.
Weighing in at under 1kg and just under 12mm thin, the Galaxy Book S is a full-sized laptop sporting a big 13.3-inch touchscreen display, full size keyboard and generous trackpad area.
Under the hood is where things get interesting. This is a Windows ARM-powered device, running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx platform – it’s a 7nm chipset (Qualcomm’s first), it runs without a fan, and its really designed with running Windows in mind. The 8cx platform lets the laptop accomplish some pretty neat tricks like instant-on (perhaps instant-wake is more appropriate). The Snapdragon 8cx is paired up with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM.
There’s also some pretty amazing battery life being quoted by Samsung, with 23 hours’ video playback performance (under some pretty specific conditions, but 23 hours all the same).
The model hitting Australian shelves runs with 256GB of built-in storage, and you can add up to 1TB of storage should you have an appropriately large Micro SD card (it fits into the SIM tray on the underside of the laptop). It’s running Windows 10 Home, but users can upgrade to Pro if desired.
We’ve had a brief stint with the Galaxy Book S this morning. Everything’s pretty fast and snappy, unlike the last time we saw a Windows machine running an ARM processor. It’ll be interesting to see how many of our regularly-used apps run in the ARM environment, and we’re looking forward to putting it through its paces.
If you’re sold (and we’ve been pretty up on the device since we first saw photos of it), you can walk into JB Hi-Fi, Harvey Norman or a Samsung retail store on January 31 and pick up a hot new laptop. You can also order online at samsung.com.
This will make a perfect travel tablet.
Looks fantastic but will wait to see if it can run any major apps like Microsoft Office before committing to purchasing one. The price is a bit of a set back, though considering it may or may not run any Wintel apps.
Hey Sujay, it sounds like you may have encountered Windows RT (which I also have in the past, hence the quip about compatibility).
From reading this article https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-on-arm-what-you-need-to-know-before-you-buy-a-surface-pro-x/ it looks like most 32-bit apps should run fine (they run under emulation), but 64-bit apps are a no-no.
Microsoft do have an ARM version of office.The issue is other vendors apps and less MS ones.