Samsung Galaxy Book S: Rise of the phone-like laptop (The Daily Charge, 8/12/2019)

Today on the Daily Charge, you got your laptop in my phone. You got phone in my laptop. We got Josh Goldman here to talk about desktops and Samsung Galaxy book heads. [MUSIC] Good morning and welcome to CNET's Daily Daily charges Monday, August wealth I'm Ben Fox Raven and with me today is Josh Goldman to talk laptops with phone processors like the Samsung Galaxy book s. Now without further ado Let's talk to the expert. Okay, so it's a PC, it's a phone, maybe it's both. That's how you might describe a new group of devices coming out that look like laptops but have phone processors built in. The latest version is the galaxy book s which Samsung revealed at its note 10 launch event last week. Okay, so Josh What's the value of these kinds of devices? And also, is it a phone processor, or is it just something from Qualcomm that they're trying to work their way into more laptops? Well, and they started off, well, where do you wanna start? Let's start with the processor. Let's start with the processor. Cuz that's the big. Deal here is that Qualcomm's been working on these processors to turn them into the PC market. Now supposedly that was because smartphone market was slowing down. So the next slower market is laptops. [LAUGH] I don't know. Okay, so for people that wanna know more about these types of products Like what are the big benefits of having these types of processors in them? So the big benefit, longer battery life, lighter weight. Laptops in general always on LTE connection. That's pretty much it. So it's kinda like a phone. Sort of and it gets much better battery life. Like, so for instance, the Galaxy Book S, they were saying was gonna be 23 hours, which sounds really impressive for a laptop, right? Right, and there's an extra next to that of course. It's 23 hours of video played back. And it's usually, when they run that test, it's usually local video playback. So it's not even streaming, so- Which is usually not what people use it for, anyway. Yeah, I guess if you're downloading In stuff from Netflix or whatever to your device and then- [CROSSTALK] Just stop, I'm no longer impressed, I'm not even interested. Well, I mean and that's the thing is that 23 hours is a great talking point. But then you probably talking, don't get me wrong the past ones we've reviewed with the Snapdragon 835 and 850 had really good battery life like amazing battery life that you wouldn't expect from a laptop. Again, though, that performance isn't quite there. So that's what I wanted to talk about. So we already talked about the good let's talk about the bad, the performance issues. It seems like every single one of these laptops have They're kind of sluggish, even if you're just like browsing the Internet. Yeah. So again, it's kinda like trying to run a large phone or tablet off of a processor that's maybe not designed to do that. And mainly it's not designed to run Windows specifically. So it's I mean If she wrote that back. They designed it these, [CROSSTALK] He's not doing very well. So what was happening was these these battery lives are really great Except it would take longer to do things so kind of balanced itself out And the other element that I want to throw in there is also price. I was pretty surprised that the galaxy book **** was just like $1 under 1000 bucks which for kind of a more like a slower processor I might have expected a lower price range than that. Yeah, I mean miniaturization always cost more. So when you're getting something very thin, that's really light. I mean, the things weighs what? Two pounds- You tell me, you're the expert. I don't know, I wrote about it last week. [LAUGH] It weights around two pounds, 23 hour battery life. So I mean, you've got something that is going to cost more. Okay that's bad. Just because of the components and everything's new when it's only when stuff is around for a while, the prices come down. So, And just to be clear, also asterisk on the show. We have not reviewed the specific laptop yet. So like that's their talking point for 23 hours, we're probably going to get a chance to look at this later. But at this point, like for instance, what are some of these Like in this code word what laptops have you read it out. !Well I reviewed the somewhat predecessor is the Galaxy Book2 which was a detachable so it was more like a tablet with a detachable keyboard cover and that one was supposed to get over 20 hours of battery life as well. That was running a Snapdragon 850 it got really good battery life into the teens. But again you pay the price because it takes a little bit [CROSSTALK] too weird handoff .>> The best part about it was was that and with the past models to and presumably this one is that Like your phone it'll jump back and forth between Wi-Fi and like if you're on a non-WiFi network and all of the sudden you leave that network and go to the coffee shop and you open it up. It's automatically switched to LTE. So you've got that mobile broadband connection instantly and you're not sitting there waiting. Okay, I've got a switch over from Wi Fi. You can pop it open and start working and that's what they're what Samsung is doing with this one toes You've got a laptop that's super light weight and long battery life. You don't really have to worry about too much. As long as you're in area with a signal of some sort, you should be able to start working immediately. Sam, I do wanna jump to another topic, so Sammsung also talked about Dex, which is kind of like, you dock your phone into your laptop or into a screen. Is your expectation that something like DeX is gonna grow? They've been talking about it for a little while now, and I don't really know if it's got any sort of, I don't know, fan base? Maybe I'm wrong about that. I'm sure it's got fans. I don't know How many Samsung certainly likes it, they keep working at it. Yeah. So that's kind of different than its kind of what the complaint has been about with like the iPad pros is like you've got this super powerful tablet that isn't quite What you want from a PC or like a Mac Book or something. No touch pad basically, no touch pad. And then, Decks comes along and it's Android based. And then, you can instantly switch it and you get this nice desktop experience. So it can feels like you're using Windows or Mac. But it's still a little sluggish because you're running an app and it's you know, it's kinda like a side thing that the phone or tablets designed to do. It used to be that you could you had to dock it, and then the phone started doing it automatically you just plug it in your USBC. And that's kind of this latest version is sort of the evolution of that where you can plug it into your regular windows or Mac laptop. And you get that desktop experience so you can Switch back and forth between using files on your phone to using files on your laptop. All right, I can say I'm not entirely sold on either of these ideas, but I'd love to hear from folks that are watching the show to kind of generate some ideas. Maybe folks really like this. I'm not really sure. I can't say that. I've Have you used that at all or no? No, that's why you're here, my friend. But either way to learn more about Qualcomm processors, DAX, the Samsung Galaxy Book S or any of these types of hybrid devices, you can check out the links below or follow us on Twitter. For the Daily Charge, I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Josh Goldman. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]