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

Great product if u don't want to photo edit things with the S Pen.

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge’s aluminum chassis is well built and incredibly thin. I’ve weighed the laptop at just 3lbs 6.8 oz. The color I got is “Sapphire Blue” but in my opinion it is mostly silver with a just a hint of blue. There is an HDMI 2.1 (up to 60hz) alongside 2 USB-C 4 ports on the left-hand side. On the right is a USB-A 3.2, a headphone/mic combo jack, and a microSD card slot for additional storage. I also really like that the laptop does not have a proprietary charger or charging port, it simply includes a USB-C power brick. The display is as good as it gets with the Samsung Dynamic AMOLED 2X. With OLED, the blacks are black, the grays are gray, and the colors are vibrant. At 16” and a resolution of 3K there is a lot of real estate and combined with the portability makes this an excellent computer for getting work done on the go. The screen is also touch and multi-gesture enable. There is also an anti-reflective coating on the display to reduce glare. The trackpad is one of the largest I’ve ever seen on a Windows laptop and supports multi-gesture. The keyboard is comfortable to type on and includes a number pad. The top right of the keyboard sports a fingerprint reader, which can be used to login or unlock the laptop. One downside is the side-firing quad AKG speakers. There is very little bass and a lack of fullness to the sound. Windows on Arm is not new. This is in fact my third Snapdragon laptop as Microsoft and Qualcomm have been trying to get Arm going for several years now, ever since Apple shook up the industry when they ditched Intel CPUs and released their own Arm based M-series chips. That ushered in a new era of integrated CPU and GPU that were not only powerful, but much more efficient, requiring less cooling and much less power. The Elite X is a 4nm system on a chip with 12-cores and it is fast. I clocked a 2872 single-core and 15570 multi-core score on Geekbench 6, which shockingly beats my Intel Core i9-13980HX, a gaming laptop from last year with 24 cores. I started using the Book4 Edge as my coding workstation and so far, I have been impressed. I’ve been able to install all my software engineering tools within WSL2 and Ubuntu Linux. Samsung provides three performance modes: “High Performance”, “Optimized”, and “Quiet”. I’ve left it on Optimized the entire time, even to do benchmarking. For the most part, it is quiet, as the fans rarely do kick on. With nearly a week’s worth of use at the office, it hasn’t crashed or thrown a single curve ball at me, which is impressive for a new processor. The Elite X also includes an NPU, or Neural Processing Unit, which can process large amounts of data in parallel, much more efficiently than a GPU can. Copilot+ is Microsoft’s branding for these new generation of PCs that contain an NPU and are designed to process AI-intensive tasks like language translations and generation locally on the laptop. As a Copilot+ PC, you get a new Copilot key immediately next to the right Alt key. This shortcut launches Microsoft Copilot, an AI powered app that can answer your questions as if you are in a conversation or create images for you on the fly. I personally find this key very useful as I have been getting used to using these new tools in my workflow over the past year. The laptop also features Windows Studio Effects, which are NPU accelerated features that can enhance video conferencing. My favorite is the eye contact feature which will make it appear as if you are looking at the camera, even though you are reading content from the screen or slightly looking elsewhere. Speaking of video conferencing, the webcam on this laptop is better than most I’ve seen, producing sharp images even in lower light. Cocreator is another AI powered tool inside of the MS Paint program. It’s currently in Preview mode and I can see why. It's hit or miss, but to be fair, I’m not an artist. The idea is you sketch something and then describe what you are trying to create. Cocreator will use AI to generate an image for you. There is a slider that allows you to adjust the “creativity”. Adjust it all the way to the right and it fabricates something that seems to only take the text prompt into account, not the sketch. Move it all the way to the left and it mostly leaves your sketch unchanged. The key is to find some place in the middle but it’s merely guessing at what you want, and the results can be wild or otherworldly, like limbs or hands that are missing or in an unnatural position. I had better luck keeping the creativity level low and sketching inanimate objects. My favorite AI feature is live translations, an extension of the Live Captions feature that you find on non Copilot+ PCs. With this, you can put on a video, audiobook, podcast, anything and press Win+Ctrl+L to enable it. You will see the language spoken transcribed into English on the fly. It is pretty cool and opens up access to content instantly that isn’t subtitled like a broadcast of a sporting event in another country or a Zoom meeting where they are speaking a different language. Right now, it works with 40+ languages. While clearly not a gaming laptop, I found that the integrated Adreno GPU is actually pretty good. I was able to run Rocket League, casual games like Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and even Cyberpunk 2077. The bigger issue is whether the game will run at all on the new architecture. Fortnite will install but just simply tells you “ARM64 CPU is not supported.” when you launch it. Shadow of the Tomb Raider could not find a graphics card. I also could not get my USB4 dock’s ethernet port to work. When I went to the manufacturer’s support there was a note that their Windows ethernet driver does not work on Arm so that explains that. You will want to get into the habit of looking for Arm64 (sometimes called aarch64) downloads when installing software. While a lot of popular and mainstream applications such as web browsers have Windows releases for Arm there are years worth of legacy applications that will only ever support Intel x86/x86_64. For those apps that’s where emulation comes into play and for the most part it is seamless. I honestly can't discern any performance hit on an emulated application, but you will get peak performance and max battery efficiency if you can find an aarch64 version. So while you may run into the occasional app that won't run I think these will get resolved sooner than later as the excitement and hype around these new generation of PCs is strong. As adoption rapidly ramps up developers will be updating their games, apps, and drivers to support the new architecture. As far as battery life, while I’m not getting the 22 hours that Samsung claims in their marketing it has more than met my expectations. On a 4K video loop at 50% brightness and 50% volume I got just under 15 hours. Pros: - Beautiful AMOLED 2X 16” Touch Screen - 3K Resolution at 120hz - HUGE Trackpad w/ multi-gestures - Premium Build - Quiet Operation - Incredibly Lightweight and Thin for 16” - Supports Copilot+ w/ new NPU - 1 TB of storage - Excellent Webcam - Windows 11 Home with Disk Encryption - Full-size Keyboard with Copilot Key - Wifi 7 and Bluetooth v5.3 - USB-4 Support - Fingerprint reader - 3.5 Headphone/Mic jack and microSD Card Slot - No Proprietary Charger – USB-C Power Adapter Cons: - Some Arm Compatibility Issues - AKG Speakers Could be Better Overall – this laptop is what some Windows loyalists have been dreaming of for years. A premium, full-size, lightweight device with excellent performance, a killer screen, and great battery life. As long as the software compatibility continues to get better the future for Windows on Arm is strong!

AI is here - and the Galaxy Book4 Edge knows how to deal with it - effortlessly. After digesting all the media hype, news articles, and advertisements concerning AI; my impression was that it would be a steep learning curve. But my experience with the Book4 so far has been very comfortable and easy to pick up. The Book4 is immediately impressive out of the box. Given the features & power, it's incredibly slim. Fit & finish are excellent. Setup is smooth, the perfunctory initial download for updates & restart took less than 10 minutes. If you haven't had a new laptop in awhile, you'll be amazed at the speed at which it will copy your files & settings from your previous unit - it still amazes me. 15 minutes from opening the box I was all set to go without skipping a beat. The Book4's power button also serves as a fingerprint reader; it works quite well, and identifies quickly unlike previous devices I've used the technology on. Glancing at the keyboard, I noticed the new CoPilot button, which is used in conjuntion with the new AI features, and made me all the more anxious to see what this puppy could do. The first app on my list was Cocreator - actually, not sure if it's an app on it's own, more like a feature added to Paint. This is not something you can download or utilize like Meta AI or Image Creator; it's only available on a CoPilot PC. First off, I have zero artistic ability - even my hangman stick figures look sad. But, I gave it a shot and followed the guidance. It said to add text and draw what I'm thinking of. Looking at my dog, I typed in "Golden Retriever in the grass." I then suggests you loosely draw your image. Without even a stylus, I traced out something on the screen that you couldn't guess was either a dog, a pig, or a horse. Out of this, Cocreator made an image I was astounded with. My wife was watching, and said "let me try it." She played a few minutes, and was ready to go. We had just bought a Roblox gift card for our niece, so she typed in "A 9 year old girl in Roblox." What came out was something that if you printed it out on card stock would be difficult to differentiate from a $5 Hallmark card. So that's what she did, printed a card & enclosed the gift card. When she got it, my niece blurted out "where did you get this?!!" If a couple of non-artistic rank amateurs like us put this together in a few minutes, I can only imagine what it can do for someone with artistic talent & a stylus. What a giant leap for the Paint program! Also worth mentioning, the fact that the Book4 comes with a supersized touch pad definitely adds to the experience. Which brings me to the point of the AMOLED screen. It's bright, sharp, positively the best screen I've owned. The fact that it's a touchscreen makes it even more amazing. Maybe it's an optical illusion, but it looks larger than my previous laptop's 17"OLED. It has automatic ambient light detection, and looks good even in bright daylight. Another highlight, or maybe I should say innovation, is Live Caption. It's like Closed Caption gone mad. It will add text to your Zoom meeting in real time, movies or shows that don't have their own captioning, and... it speaks 44 languages and translates! My favorite use for this - how-to Youtube videos in a foreign language. Now nothing is beyond my reach! Speaking of Zoom calls, the Book4 is not done yet! Whether it's a Zoom, a video phone call or a podcast, also built in is Windows Studio Effects. This feature improves lighting, has AI that will keep you centered in the shot, maintains eye contact, blurs your background, as well as other features (I saw make it look artistic or cartoonish, but didn't try that.) In spite of all the increased processing power these AI features add, the Snapdragon processor seems to handle it all in stride. I'd be hard put to distinguish it from any Intel or AMD processor I've previously owned. In all the exercises I've put the Book4 to, I haven't heard it breathe more than a gentle breeze. I don't know the technical aspects of it, but my guess is they've got a one-up on their competitors when it comes to keeping it cool. One way to gauge this is to just take a look at the power pack - it looks pretty much like a 20W phone charger; not the brick that's usually associated with laptop power supplies. Samsung has made a great entry into the CoPilot laptop field; if you're in the market, I strongly suggest you take a look.