hey everybody it’s lon seidman we’re taking a look today at the galaxy book go this is the most affordable arm powered windows 10 laptop that has come out to date and we’re going to take a look and see what this thing can and mostly can’t do in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that i paid for this with my own funds all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this laptop is all about now the price point on this is 349. typically all of the other arm powered windows 10 devices we’ve looked at cost a lot more than this does and this is mostly one of your run-of-the-mill low-end laptops it doesn’t have the best build quality you can see that keyboard flexing here as i push down on it this is all plastic but it’s not bad i suppose for what you’re paying it does have a 14 inch display running at 1080p it’s a bit on the colder side it’s slightly washed out and not all that bright but the resolution is there the system is powered by a snapdragon processor a qualcomm snapdragon 7c 2 and we’ll do some benchmarks in a little bit to see where this lines up with other similar computers the good news is is that this is coming in at around what you would see out of a low end intel processor with lower compatibility and we’ll also talk about some of the compatibility issues in a few minutes now the base model here does not have much memory or
storage it has only four gigabytes of ram which is not much for windows these days and 128 gigabytes of storage you can’t upgrade anything on it even though it’s easy to get inside of it and we did take it apart on my extras channel the other day so you can see what’s inside now you will only have about 75 gigabytes or so of storage available to you after you install windows and of course over time you’ll see windows updates and other things kind of eat into that so you will be constrained and again you can’t upgrade the storage internally but what you can do is get an sd card and pop it in the micro sd card slot here and thankfully this card will sit flush to the side of the case so you could get a nice big card they’re not all that expensive and augment that onboard storage for photos and other things that you might want to put on this device because you’re not going to have all that much room on the internal drive they do have other models of course that cost more with more storage and memory but for this one this is all you’re getting at this price and that’s all you’ll ever have you do have a headphone microphone jack here on the left hand side above that sd card slot and a usb type-c port for power and data devices this does not do video output but there is another usbc port on the other side that will do
video output and power and data devices so this port is full service the other one on the other side is just data and power kind of odd usually you see full service ports on both sides but on this one just here you have a usb 3 port right here that’s what you can use to plug in keyboards and mice and other things and you’ve got a kensington lock slot for locking it down on a desk now this is completely silent and fanless and i think its efficiency is its key and maybe only selling point because you’ll get close to 18 hours of battery life out of it that’s what samsung is stating in their marketing materials and in my testing i think you’ll get close to that provided you stick to the basics like word processing email maybe some media watching and that sort of thing nothing beyond that and the good news is the compatibility issues that these arm processors bring mean that you won’t be doing much more than the basics on here so if you are pretty much living in the microsoft or google ecosystems this will run their basic apps quite well for a very long time it’s not going to be super fast but it’s going to be adequate and it will just keep going and if that’s attractive then this might be worth considering but if you’ve got a lot of software applications that are outside of google apps and microsoft 365 or whatever you might run into trouble and that’s where you might want to look at an intel based device now the devices i mentioned doesn’t feel all that well built the
keyboard has these smaller chiclet keys they’re not bad they’ve got decent travel on them but i found it not to be the best typing surface primarily because the keyboard is so bouncy the trackpad is really bad on this it’s very firm but it’s not tracking very accurately and i found that when i’m dragging things around with my finger and thumb here if i have my thumb down sometimes the mouse kind of jumps all over the place so it’s just not a very good build at all and i would have liked to have seen a better keyboard and trackpad especially out of a name brand like samsung in many ways this kind of feels like some of those cheap no-name chinese brands that we look at from time to time the display here is not a touch display but it will go flat to the desk here and that’s a good thing if you’ve got kids that might get a little rough with the equipment every once in a while so it is a bit forgiving there but again the display is more on the blue side and kind of washed out and not all that nice to look at now the weight on this is pretty standard for this size of laptop it’s coming in just over three pounds or 1.4 kilograms again mostly plastic but it won’t weigh you down too much when you’re walking around with it so this is the output of its onboard 720p webcam it actually looks pretty good there is some image processing that the snapdragon processor is doing to the image and that’s something similar to what these processors do on smartphones so you do get a bit of a bump in image quality but it’s still not great this does though work fine with zoom and microsoft teams and all the other meeting platforms out there it does those fairly well so you shouldn’t have any issues doing your work from homework on this device all right let’s take a look at how it performs now i’m going to load up the microsoft edge browser now i am not running google chrome on this laptop right now because there is not a version of chrome optimized for the arm processor inside of this so this will run chrome but it’s going to run the intel version which has to get translated in
real time to run on this chip and as a result it runs a bit slower so with an arm optimized browser like edge here you can see that it kind of performs about where a laptop at this price point with an intel processor will perform it’s able to render web pages relatively quickly if you’re using this you may not even know it’s running with a non-intel processor and from a web browsing standpoint i think it’ll do quite well and a little bit earlier we took a look at my youtube channel running a 1080p 60 video it was able to play that back just fine we had a couple of drop frames when it first started but it was able to keep up with that higher frame rate youtube video no problem that means this will also do well with netflix and twitch and any other video streaming service that you’re watching so all together from a media consumption standpoint this will do fine and you’ll get a good amount of battery life to do it with too and on the browserbench.org speedometer benchmark test we got a score of 36.6 running the arm optimized version of microsoft edge and what’s of interest here is that this is actually coming in at around the same performance as the hp stream 14 a very similar computer at a very similar price point that we looked at about two years ago so we’re not getting much out of this arm optimized code versus another low end computer and if you take a look again at the chart you can see the asus l210 that we looked at a couple of weeks ago with a more recent version of intel’s low-end chip came in at 54.7 now benchmarks don’t always tell the whole story but it does give you an idea as to where the
performance is on this and again the key advantage here is battery life nothing else because you will run into some compatibility issues now apps like microsoft office and word do run fairly well on this but they’re going to run at about the same speed they would on an intel version of a computer in this price category so if we go over here to a word doc it’ll load up very quickly we’ll have things come up as they would pretty much do on an intel machine but they’re not going to feel any faster again it’s really going to be about battery life and of course the microsoft and this is the trackpad problem i was talking about of course the microsoft software here is optimized for arm so you will be getting as much performance as you can out of this processor but it won’t really be much of an advantage over an intel equivalent beyond the battery life now where you run into compatibility issues is when you go beyond the web browser and the microsoft office software and into things that are designed to run on intel processors now i found so far these arm devices do really well with older 32-bit intel code so for example i’ve got microsoft visual foxpro here some of you computer geeks out there will remember this this is an old windows database application that i ran at my old job and this is not arm optimized they stopped working on this years ago but it runs fine here it actually runs quite well even though it’s not on a native intel chip and this is all getting translated by microsoft code in the background this stuff actually works okay for the most part but when you get into 64-bit applications what you’ll likely encounter when you’re on more modern software you’re going to be seeing this message quite a bit that 64-bit apps will not run on your pc and then it’s going to point you at the app store to find the compatible arm or 32-bit version of the software the problem is is that microsoft doesn’t give
you an easy way to browse for compatibility on the windows app store or anywhere else for that matter they’re trying to make this look seamless but the problem is is that in many cases software that you can install on your windows pc with an intel chip just won’t be available here with no explanation given or when you go to boot it up you get this message now one thing you can do is you can install a developer beta of windows which will give you the ability to run 64-bit software in emulation similar to how the older 32-bit stuff will work but you are taking a risk here because this is a developer build of windows that might have some bugs in it certainly it’s not fully performance optimized so it’s not going to be as stable in experience or as fast as an experience as you would have running with a native intel 64-bit processor so here’s a good example of a 64-bit app that we’re running on that developer build of windows and as you can see it’s kind of drawing the screen in here with a simple application very slowly it’s not very quick just yet partly because they haven’t yet gotten all this 64-bit code to translate as efficiently as the 32-bit code does and this is kind of the chicken and egg problem with these arm-based machines so what i’ve been recommending to people is that if you’re doing microsoft office in a web browser and you want battery life consider it but otherwise don’t yet because this is not as mature as what apple has done with arm on their platform and i think a lot of folks are getting disappointed by what they experience with these machines especially when they try to run 64-bit code now gaming on this computer is pretty much out of the question most of the games out there are not optimized for this processor and you’re going to have all sorts of weird issues pop up this is bioshock infinite it was running at 720p the game thought it was running full screen but it was running in this little window here lowest settings we were getting about 20 to 25
frames per second again because it’s got to translate everything not all that playable but it might be on a comparable intel computer this is half-life 2 an older game this is from about 2006 or so and it’s running okay here but not as well as it does on intel hardware at the same 1080p resolution i was not able to get my frame rate counter to work but it looks like we were just under 30 frames per second here not spectacular we did though have better success with shovel knight this is also an intel game a 2d platformer this was running at a full 60 frames per second so you might be able to coax some things to run at a playable frame rate but most of what you try to run gaming wise isn’t going to run at all and if it does it’s going to run very very slowly even compared to an entry-level intel laptop now we typically run the 3d mark gaming benchmarks on laptops we review here on the channel but unfortunately 3dmark is not compatible with this laptop at all even with the intel translation so we ran geekbench 5 which is optimized for arm and gives us a real apples to apples compared to intel based machines so let’s have a look at that result we got a score of 559 on the single core test and 1644 on the multi-core test and that’s a little bit better than the entry level intel processor we typically see the n4020 so if software is properly optimized for this machine you might see a little bit of a bump over what you might see on an intel device for the same price but it requires a developer to optimize for the chipset if they don’t you won’t be getting near the performance that a similarly priced intel machine will deliver to you but
you will get the battery life and again that’s the trade-off so if we see more developer support i think this arm platform could be really useful but unfortunately it’s been a couple of years now and we’re not seeing a
groundswell of support developing for arm primarily because so few people are buying these computers so the big question with this one is whether or not the lower price point might attract more buyers and build a bit of a user base that might make arm optimized code profitable and that remains to be seen so the bottom line here is that if you are running the basics like microsoft office and a web browser this is worth considering because you’ll get great battery life for the price point but if you’re doing anything else you’re likely going to be frustrated that’s going to do it for now until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by theland.tv supporters including gold level supporters chris allegretta tom albrecht jim calliger hot sauce and video games and brian parker if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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