Samsung - Galaxy Book Flex Alpha 2-in-1 13.3" QLED Touch-Screen Laptop - Intel Core i7 - 12GB Memory - 512GB SSD - Royal Silver

As a construction inspector my job is to ensure that the contractors work is in conformity with the various architectural and engineering specifications for that particular project manual. As a result I take hundreds of photos a week while visiting various out-of-town project job sites. Many are very detailed and specific to an issue or the specified product, and, or materials required. In my motel room I mark-up many of my job photos with a digital pen highlighting details, which need further clarification by the architect or engineer. I e-mail my marked-up photos that night so they are ready for determination and further direction by the design professionals the next morning. Along with the photos I also send my written reports, and, or detailed narratives. For five days I used this Samsung Galaxy Book Flex Alpha 2-in-1 13.3 Inch Touch Screen Laptop on my out of town construction projects. It is a dynamic, portable, home-office laptop, which allows me to store and highlight my job photos and create MS Word document-reports too. Since it is a 2-in-1 it is ideal for use with my digital pen. I simply flip the screen over backwards over the keyboard into tablet mode and it enables me to make detailed job notations and remarks. WooHoo! So, why do I love using this Samsung Galaxy Book Flex Alpha 'Workhorse'? ** POWER & SPEED – This Samsung features a 512 GB Solid State Drive, which enables faster loading of my large photo files. This faster loading saves me time and allows me to be more productive. Coupled with Intel's 10th generation, i7-10510U processor, and 12 GB DDR4 SDRAM Memory, this is one fast and powerful, workhorse laptop. It is notable that DDR4 is the Fourth Generation in RAM. It provides the latest development in increased data transfer rates (1600 Mbps to 3200 Mbps) and larger capacities. This baby can do lots of work, and quickly too. ** BUILD & PORTABILITY – This well-designed laptop is made of lightweight aluminum and is a classy-looking, silver finish. It weighs approximately 2 pounds and 10 ounces. It is 8 Inches by 12 inches and only a half inch thick. My cell phone is thicker then this Samsung laptop. It easily fits into my backpack. I really appreciate the rounded edges of the entire case. It has a backlit keyboard controlled by a light sensor at the top and to the left of the keyboard. The built-in keyboard is configurable and comfortable to use. The keys have a little 'travel-resilience' and respond well. Because of its smaller footprint it does not feature a numerical pad. The keyboard also has a fingerprint reader, which I can use for added security. The generously-sized trackpad is mounted in the center just underneath the space bar of the keyboard, and is very responsive. I love the convertible flip screen, 2-in-1 feature. It makes doing my notations, drawings, and remarks on my photos so much easier to do compared to my previous laptop. When the screen is flipped past the transition point to be used as a tablet, the keyboard and touchpad are automatically locked out. A tablet mode window will pop up and ask me if I want to switch. The screen will automatically orientate itself into portrait or landscape mode, whichever I choose as I position my screen. I think this 2-in1 feature is the best characteristic of this laptop for me while on-the-road. If you do lots of editing or mark-up photos like I do this 2-in-1 laptop is exactly what you need. ** STORAGE - I keep all of my various job Specification Manuals in digital document form stored on my laptop. The average Job Specification Manual contains approximately 300 pages. This Samsung workhorse allows me to take my laptop to my job sites so I can refer back to the Job Specifications when needed. I store most of my Digital Manuals and job- photos on the fast, 512 GB SSD, and, back them up on a 1TB, Micro SDXC Card using the Memory Card, Reader Slot. The Memory Card Reader supports SDXC cards up to 2TB. How cool is that? This Samsung provides me with plenty of storage options and accessibility too. YooHoo! ** QLED SCREEN – This Galaxy Book Flex Alpha duplicates the same kind of screens in popular Samsung' HD TVs. The screen is 2K HD, and is all I need for photo mark-ups and editing. A 4K screen would lose its perspective in this smaller 13.3 inch screen size. I set-up my QLED display in 'Samsung Settings' to Dynamic Mode for more vivid color and clarity. Steaming movies and videos in QLED, full and rich colors is delightful. The Samsung engineers utilize quantum dots to enhance the various colors, shades, and hues to present the best true color renditions available. So, this QLED screen provides the whole color spectrum in intense brilliance, and in any light conditions. This true color reproduction is why this is one of the more popular laptops at its price-point for photographers. The Outdoor Mode (F10) is amazingly bright, and I have used it on-the-job in bright light conditions, but not direct sunlight. The screen is also a sensitive Touch Screen, which I only use when using my Digital Pen, but a must in Tablet Mode. On the top of the screen is a built-in 720p, front-facing camera. On either side of the camera in the top case are twin mics. ** PORTS – On the right side of the unit are two USB 3 ports, and they are colored the standard blue for USB 3.0 ports. There is a Micro SD Memory Card Reader, which supports up to 2TB SDXC cards. Then, the ON switch for you computer. It also turns ON when you tilt-up the screen from the keyboard. On the left side of the unit is the DC charging port, HDMI port, USB Type C port, and 3.5mm headphone/mic jack. ** OTHER FEATURES – The WI-Fi card is 802.11ax 2x2 160MHz, which is approximately three times faster then standard MU-MIMO, 802.11ac 2x2 80 MHz . However, your router needs to have the hardware to march this card to take advantage of the faster download speeds. This laptop also has Bluetooth Pairing capabilities. The main body has two bottom speakers on the right and left sides towards the front. They are OK, but I paired an auxiliary Bluetooth speaker for richer sound to match the quality of streaming movies I watch on this unit. I am going to mention the additional software in Samsung Settings in addition to Win 10. Some are very helpful for my system: screen display, audio, and pen usage settings. ** BATTERY & CHARGING – I have used this Samsung on-the-road for approximately six hours a day. At the end of the second day I fully charge it overnight. If I did not stream a movie each day I probably would get a few more hours. But, I think over 12 hours of heavy battery use is terrific. There is also a very helpful Smart Battery Calibration using the set-up key, F2. Be aware users cannot change the interior battery – only a qualified Samsung Service Center can accomplish installation of a replacement battery. ** SUMMARY – I love this Galaxy Book Flex Alpha laptop. It has made me more productive on-the-road by saving me much time because of faster photo file loading, editing, and making notations on Job Photos very easy. It is powerful and fast, lightweight, and extremely portable. This laptop would make a great gift for a High School or College student. It also makes a FUN gift for that budding photographer, family member, or friend on your list. For my applications it is a Five Star laptop.

We decided to get a laptop for my wife in an effort to graduate out of a family Chromebook and on to something with more capability and power, understanding that it may get shared around with the kids for odds and ends. With that in mind, the price point we landed on afforded quite a few choices, and things to think about- comparable options to a laptop considered were a Google Pixel, a Microsoft Surface Pro or IPad Pro, all legitimate box-tickers for what the intended use would be. We own a few tablets in the house and have a good feel for what they offer, but ultimately we felt that the Galaxy Book Flex Alpha was the best of all worlds. The general 2-in-1 design offered the lightweight tablet-like feel while providing the specs and horsepower to take that to the next level. The Galaxy Book Alpha hit the sweet spot for what we were looking for perfectly. When we targeted the laptop, we knew what it was going to be, and knew what it wasn’t. I could have hit a lower price target for value, but would have paid pretty dearly in performance and build quality. For a few hundred bucks more I could have gotten a build spec more tailored to high-end video/audio processing, or a dedicated gaming rig- but we weren’t looking for that type of performance. The Alpha offers a premium-feeling build quality and a spec package that is generally more than enough for anything we want to throw at it. From a form perspective, the laptop has a real clean and polished look with a brushed aluminum body, curved corners and beveled edges all around. Compact and sturdy with a pair of pretty strong hinges for 360 degree action, it converts from laptop to tent to straight up tablet mode with enough tension to feel easy but secure. The screen itself has an almost non-existent bezel, and the touchscreen aspect is flawless. Full responsiveness all around to my touch, I can’t comment on how a stylus performs as I don’t have one, and it didn’t come with one included. The keyboard is a short-stroke shallow keycap setup- which I love. I know opinions vary about this, as the trend forever has been mechanical keys with tactile clicky response, but something about the almost-silent and sleek efficiency this design offers is right up my alley, and completely in line with the style and feel of the whole laptop. While the wrist-rest area with the touchpad is minimal in size based on the compact form factor, the short deck really didn’t hamper my typing experience. If you have enormous hands it may bother you, but then again you should be looking at the larger screen model if you need that for your mitts. The touchpad was extremely responsive and intuitive, which was to be expected. The whole compact package comes in at a little over 2.5 pounds and a half inch thick- it brings easy portability and durability along with the premium look and feel. As it relates to the array of ports around the perimeter, you get a single USB-C (data only- real disappointment here- I should never have to buy a laptop in this day and age using the old barrel DC adapter…), a pair of USB 3.0 Type A ports, an HDMI port if you want to expand your screen to a monitor or TV, a combo headphone/microphone jack, a micro-SD port, and the dreaded DC adaptor port. Having thunderbolt jacks here would have been ideal, but something had to give for the cost I suppose (I would have traded off the biometric fingerprint reader, while a nice to have, it would have lost a race against thunderbolt ports by more than a few lengths…). The QLED display is something else. I’m used to LED, or even the upscale OLED 4K displays you can find at much higher price points, but this seems to be a really outstanding middle-ground from a value perspective. The screen resolution hangs in at full HD 1920x1080, but the Samsung OLED technology renders a really vivid and crisp display with rich & deep colors. Outside of getting a much nicer windows experience in general, it’s a pretty amazing medium for a media device, or for lightweight photo editing or digital art if you enjoy that. From all accounts and reviews on this family of Samsung devices, the display is the real savior of the build. Accompanying the visual experience is a (surprisingly) nice audio experience. I say that coming from a place where I don’t have high expectations for sound on laptops. They’re laptops, not stereos. The Galaxy Book has stereo speakers located on each side of the unit, which provides a pretty rich and crisp sound with body that doesn’t get dampened regardless of what configuration you have it in. From movies to music, I was immersed in the program- not wondering why it sounded weak or muffled. My mother in law has a 2-in-1 with bottom-firing speakers that sounds like you are trying to strangle it with pillows if you have it flipped the wrong way. This is loads better. As far as whats under the hood, it has a 10th Generation Intel I7 with 12G of RAM and a 512G SSD hard drive. As I said before, I knew what it had and what I needed it for. My wife is a (very) amateur photographer that will sometimes use proprietary photo software or occasionally Photoshop for editing or playing around with saturation and lighting- I loaded my CS6 software on and for those chores, it managed everything effortlessly. It likely won’t render videos with the same efficiency or speed, but I knew that going into it. My son loves to game, and for giggles we loaded Fortnite on- this machine will not provide a great experience with triple-A titles. It chugged along at 20 FPS and started heating up like crazy. Worth the shot. We have a lot of smaller budget games, emulators and titles off the Microsoft or Google Play Store that are much less intensive that worked very well on this laptop with nary a hiccup. He wasn’t my target audience when we bought it, but its good to know he can do a little gaming on it. My daughter loves digital art. Nothing super fancy, but she does a ton of sketching on software like Autodesk Sketch, and uses a Wacom tablet and stylus to fill her hours and Instagram pages- those devices and software worked extremely well, the Flex Alpha won’t break a sweat with those types of programs. Lastly (and one of the parts I love the most), this newer generation of laptop comes with the new AX Wifi protocol. I just updated the house wireless router to an Wifi-AX model, and this thing absolutely screams along at blazing speeds compared to some of my older wifi-AC protocol devices. Finally glad to be getting mileage out of that, it wasn’t cheap either. To close, I’m happy with what I found that I feel exceeded what my wife wanted: a 2-in-1 solution to bridge the tablet-to-laptop experience for whatever mood struck her. The visual experience is premium to me here, and I acknowledge that I could trade some of the dollars spent in the 2-in-1 architecture to get a clamshell laptop that is slightly better in some regards, but if you want that flexibility to be what the moment desires – being lazy watching a movie on your lap, or editing down those perfect photos at a desktop, or sketching puppies (my daughter, not me)…this really checks a lot of boxes. I normally don’t write books for reviews, but the Flex Book Alpha merits fleshing out a lot of great features with few real flaws (looking at you, barrel DC adapter..). You really get a lot of punch for the dollar here that lends itself to a pretty wide array of usages and an amazing overall experience. A very happy customer for sure.

Two weeks after I bought this laptop (which is awesome) I dropped it on the upper left corner of the screen. Minimal physical damage to the case. When I opened the lid I saw a black dot about the size of a pencil eraser on the screen in that corner with black lines running toward the right side of the screen. Boy did I wish I added protection to the unit!!! The lines went away until I left it in my cold van (Midwest winters). They spread across again. Get it warm and with every open and close of the lid (after it sleeps for a bit) the lines slowly disappeared. Over the next few weeks even the black dot disappeared from the screen as of this morning!!! Self-healing??? I don't get it!!! I wish I'd taken a picture from the start, but the picture shows what happened over the last week. Besides the fragile, but self-healing nature of the screen, it's an incredible laptop with a battery life that amazes me! With moderate use you can expect about 8 to 10 hours, sometimes more if you are just typing and keep the screen on minimum brightness. I frequently use it off and on the entire day without charging it! Charging cord clips in place when you push it in. My previous laptop was an HP and I had to make modifications to keep it in. I don't think this one will be a problem. The screen at its lowest setting can be very bright in a fairly dark room. Look up NegativeScreen on Google for some help on the eyes. I replaced the hard drive with a 1tB Black immediately. Using a larger suction cup I took the back off in one pull without damaging any of the clips. Videos on YouTube. Buy an external case for the 512gB you pull out of the system (NVME 2260 PCI-E M Key). SD card reader is Micro, which sucks. So buy an external one if you need it. Wireless is WiFi 6 so a modern router is recommended to take full advantage. It also has a 5Ghz antennae. I wasn't sure of this until I replaced my broken (and far-too-young) Netgear router with an ASUS.

This laptop has some pretty good horsepower into it. It has a 10th generation intel i7 processor with intel UHD graphics. However, the display is only full HD. It supports wireless display using the Microsoft wireless display. The laptop is light, at first, I thought that the box was empty, but the laptop was there. Too bad it came with a small power brick like old computers to charge the battery I was hopping a USB C type charger. The computer comes with (1) HDMI port, (1) USB C, (1) headphone jack, (2) USB A ports and one slot for a micro SD card. This model does not come with a SPen, however it has support for a stylus since the screen have windows Ink support. It would be nice if Samsung specify what model of SPen is recommended by them. For testing purposes, I tried my old surface pro 3 pen, and it worked like the surface pro 3 but also experience the same behavior of jagged lines when you try to draw slowly a diagonal line. I do not know if this a screen fault or a pen fault that is why I was hoping that Samsung recommends a pen for this device, if there is a pen specially design for this display it may not experience this kind of behavior. As mentioned before this laptop is pretty fast, I believe you shall be able to play 3D games with this, I am not a gamer anymore but at least two year old games shall play pretty well with this laptop. The screen is a QLED screen with vibrant colors. I do not think you are going to have problems if you are a person that works outside since with this display you can increase the brightness very high and is very bright if you do so. Regarding battery life this is hard to calculate, what I could say is that it has a good battery life if the task you are doing does not consume too much processing power. If you are playing games, watch videos etc. or doing computing intensive task you are going to cut the battery life by a lot. This laptop was aimed to content creators like videographers, artist, and photographers. I am a hobbyist photographer that my main type of photography is landscape photography. It took me a long time to color calibrate the QLED screen to match may the colors of my color calibrated 4K LG monitors. At the end I was able to get it close but not the same for some reason. Base on the color calibrator results the Qled screen can cover 99.99% of sRGB color gamut and 88.8 % of Adobe RGB color gamut which is pretty good for the price of this laptop. With this laptop I think is safe to say that can be used for basic photo editing for example removing stuff in photoshop etc. However, to experience the detail in all his glory I believe that a 4K display was a most if this was aimed to content creators. Most of you would say, “well few years ago people used to edit their pictures using only full HD etc.” but the problem is that once you experience the detail you can get from 4k displays is very hard to go back to full HD at least in my opinion. The screen size 13” is ok for FHD, however for 4K I believe it would be a little small, that could be a reason why Samsung decide to go FHD on this one. Regards processing power to edit raw pictures using Capture One is ok I have no issues; it behaves like my desktop PC. Regarding video content I cannot give an opinion on that since I do not work with video editing. My conclusion, if you ask me from a photographer point of view that 100% of his work is based on photography, I would try to find something else, not a more powerful computer but a bigger display with 4K capabilities, you need all the detail you can get from your images in order to have a more accurate representation of how your picture will look when you print the photo. If you are a person that takes a few pictures and just perform a few touches and share it in Instagram or send to family and friends I believe this laptop may work for you. If you are a person that is going to use this laptop to do office stuff, need windows, and requires a very light laptop with good battery life and nice processing power, I recommend this laptop 100%. I give it 4 stars for the lack of 4k display, and because it didn’t come with a Spen. Other than that is a pretty capable laptop.

This was a graduation gift for my son and he loves this new laptop. Powerful, light and just the right size to bring to class or library. Also great to study and use for Zoom classes from his dorm! Great quality - we love HP anything!

It is an excellent laptop but the only reason I do not give it 5 stars is that I feel that the sound is not as effective, but on the other hand it is fast and very light. great brightness

Really thought it was what I wanted and it was for the first month or two. Now that I have had it for 3 1/2 months, I get constant errors and reboots. "Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart." I've never had a new computer that has given me so many problems. I hope the rest of you have better luck. I've added a picture and I could have inserted many more of the same.

The laptop is amazing. A view minor fixable problems along the way but over a great piece of hardware.