Samsung - Galaxy Book4 Edge - Copilot+ PC - 16" AMOLED Touch-Screen Laptop - Snapdragon X Elite 3.8Ghz- 16GB Memory- 1TB Storage - Sapphire Blue

My first smartphone was a Samsung Galaxy, in fact my first several smartphones were Samsung Galaxies because they never steered me wrong. To say I was excited and curious to see what the Samsung Galaxy Book 4, with the hyped CoPilot AI features, would be an understatement. I’d assumed it would be some kind of gimmick or an overhyped advertising bullet point that didn’t actually offer that much. The truth is that CoPilot is really cool and offered some of my favorite aspects of this laptop. Before I get into that, the basics. Inside the box is the laptop, the hyper fast charging cable (20% charge in about 30 minutes, not too bad!), and a small booklet with warranty information and a barebones quick start guide. The hardware onboard is a large 16” touchscreen, 16gb RAM, 1tb SSD, and the real showstopper of the system: Snapdragon X Elite which is listed as 3.8Ghz on Samsung’s website but shows as 4.2Ghz in my system properties. This chip is the secret to the advertised CoPilot’s success and makes all the little bells and whistles work. You also get two USB4 ports (USB-C but super fast), an HDMI port, a microSD slot, a USB-A port, and the endangered species of the computer world: a headphone/mic port. The MicroSD is a small consolation though as there is no way, as far as I could tell, to add or expand the SSD under the hood like most other computers. While 1tb is the standard it really doesn’t go far these days and, maybe I’m the odd man out, I just don’t feel like a DropBox subscription is a viable storage option in the current economy of my household. I was impressed with the battery though, I charged it when I got the computer and then used it without charging off and on for almost four whole days before I had single digits and had to plug in. That is a WILD accomplishment for a laptop these days especially given how much I was using it. It wasn’t 22 hours as I’ve seen some of the advertising say but It was probably at least 12 and probably more. So CoPilot, the big AI elephant in the Galaxy Book 4 room, is it any good? Yes! There’s a dedicated key to the right of the Alt key on the keyboard that allows you to bring up CoPIlot at any point in your computing. You can have it do web searches or assist in locating settings, folders, or how to use features and programs. The Edge browser, which I’ll be honest has never been my “go-to”, is a lot more interesting when you have the option to talk with an AI to get movie recommendations, suggestions for websites (I know its probably the same as a regular search but it seems less cluttered) to buy something I’m looking for, or just talk to it about different topics to see how you can get it to interact. As an old school PC guy I remember the way old days when MS Paint was how you always made your art and then a million other programs and apps came out that stole all the artistic thunder…until now! MS Paint is back with Cocreator mode in the tool box. All the standard Paint tools are here, plus layers which somehow I missed had been added, but in addition Cocreator lets you turn what you’ve drawn/painted/etc into something more with an AI descriptor box and a series of various “styles” of art. I’ll include a picture but basically I copy/pasted a background image then painted a REALLY rough/bad unicorn for my kids before typing into Cocreator that I was trying to do a unicorn with a rainbow mane and a gold spiral horn. I clicked through the styles: Watercolor, Oil Painting, Pixel, Anime, and Ink Sketch. It automatically generated an AI version of my drawing and let me decide if I wanted it “pasted” over mine or not. Further, because this rabbit hole goes DEEP, you can adjust the “creativity” of Cocreator to decide how much of your drawing you want vs. how much it makes up. Basically there’s little noticeable difference below about 30 but if I crank it up to 95 then my art is basically gone and its all the computer’s interpretation. This led to a fun game where I just made random squiggles and then tried various prompts in the text box to see what the laptop came up with. Is it kind of silly? Yeah but I haven’t spent a tenth this much time in the Paint program since probably 8th grade! There’s a similar feature if you edit your photos too, although I found the AI Prompt to be a lot less useful at anything meaningful such as removing background people or removing glasses glare, etc. Its cool to change the background to the Photo Editing styles though such as cyberpunk, renaissance, etc. I didn’t get too into the Samsung Book Experience stuff that’s included, mostly since my current phone is sadly not a Samsung, but Samsung Studio is a slideshow/video creation program that I started playing with just to see how it worked and it prompted me to have inspiration and I began making an actual slideshow documentary on my big trip with the family last year. That’s maybe not a selling point without knowing my frame of mind recently but lets just say I don’t tend to get too in the weeds with slideshows after all the presentations I’ve done for school and work so the fact that this took me away from the AI silly stuff I was enjoying so much should speak volumes if you just take my word for it. One more surprise I had was just how much of a BEAST this computer is for gaming. There is no dedicated graphics card in this laptop, its just the RAM and the Snapdragon processor, but yet I was able to play everything I threw at it with not just no problems but with high graphics settings! I didn’t have any of the newest/hottest to test on it BUT I’ve had a lot of trouble with playing the game “Control” on some of my other systems and not the Galaxy Book 4 Edge. I was so surprised I did a little research and there are people claiming this laptop is playing Baldur’s Gate 3 without lagging. I wouldn’t call this a gaming laptop per se but if the shoe fits then why the heck not! So I’m probably missing something I want