Samsung Australia ready to sell Galaxy Book S, a notebook with a difference

Samsung will sell its glitzy new Galaxy Book S from January 31 but it comes with a twist.

Samsung Galaxy Book S notebook.

Samsung Australia has showed off its glitzy new Galaxy Book S – an enticing small and lightweight notebook with an anodised aluminium frame, premium looks and attractive features. There’s also something that makes it a little different.

Galaxy Book S weighs just 961 grams, offers up to 25 hours of battery life according to Samsung, and is just 11.8mm thick. It has a bright, 13.3-inch wide-screen TFT display with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

You get 256GB of built in solid state storage, and there’s two USB-C ports for transferring data and charging - but no reference to them being Thunderbolt 3 capable. A relatively small 25 watt charger with a USB-C lead comes in the box.

You get stereo speaker sound by AKG and support for Dolby Atmos.

The notebook runs Windows 10, it supports fingerprint login with Windows Hello and there’s a front facing camera at the top.

There is one big difference between the Galaxy Book S and most notebooks on the market: it uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx system-on-a-chip rather than a standard Intel or AMD processor. It’s what is called an “always connected” Windows 10 PC.

It’s an 8-core processor with new-age smaller seven nanometre chips that delivers energy efficiency, but the different ARM processor architecture has pluses and minuses.

Some features replicate what’s available on a mobile phone. There’s a slot on the side of the laptop for inserting an LTE SIM card for Gigabit LTE, and a microSD card of up to one Terabyte capability.

Samsung Galaxy Book S notebook.

The notebook supports Samsung DEX. You can plug a Samsung Galaxy S10 or Note 10 into one of the USB-C ports and those phones will use the Galaxy Book S screen to display as laptops. You can drag and drop files between the phone’s DEX Window and the Windows 10 home screen. It’s very user friendly.

The Galaxy Book S also supports Microsoft’s Link to Windows which lets you sync documents, photos and videos between the notebook and your smartphone.

The downside is that chips based on ARM architecture don’t support all Windows programs and drivers. You need to do your homework to ensure the Galaxy Book S can run the programs you need or have workarounds if they don’t.

For example, the Book S doesn’t support regular Adobe programs such as Photoshop or Premiere Pro. You’ll need to find alternatives.

Windows 10 on ARM does not support emulation of x64 apps, and apps that customise the Windows experience may not work correctly.

And at first blush the processor is not particularly fast.

But you may find the Samsung Galaxy Book S is a stylish and affordable choice for you.

It’s available in Earthy Gold and Mercury Gray and will be on sale in Australia from January 31 for $1699. Samsung Australia says that only the 256GB storage version will sell here.