Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge review: Snappy Snapdragon

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge might sound familiar – probably because we’ve written about the Book4 range several times in 2024 – but this laptop is different.

It’s one of a wave of new Copilot+ AI laptops that are about to revolutionise the Windows laptop industry. So far, I’ve tested the Asus Vivobook S 15 (S5507) and the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, and have been impressed with all aspects of those machines, especially their battery life.

Finally, we have a class of Windows laptops that can compete with Apple’s MacBooks for all-day stamina and, in some cases, performance. The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge takes a slightly different approach, with performance, not battery life, the main story.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge review: What you need to know

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is available in two sizes – 14in and 16in – and I was sent the larger of the two for this review. It’s a big laptop: slim but imposing, with a huge 16in, 2,880 x 1,800 AMOLED display topping a laptop that’s about as desirable as they get.

What’s most interesting about this machine, though, isn’t the size, slenderness or the build quality. It’s what’s lurking beneath its smart silver shell that sets it apart: a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor – the most powerful X1E-84-100 in the range, no less – backed here by 16GB of RAM and 1TB of eUFS storage. The 14in machine makes do with the slower X1E-80-100, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of eUFS storage.

It’s interesting mainly because this is an ARM-based processor, not an x86 chip from the likes of Intel and AMD, and that usually means greater efficiency. It also means potential compatibility issues, particularly with legacy hardware and certain types of software.

But Apple went through this when it switched to ARM with its M-series processors and made a huge success of it and, so far, I’ve been equally impressed with this new brand of Windows equivalents.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge review: Price and competition

Configuration tested: 16in, 2,880 x 1,800, 120Hz Super AMOLED touchscreen; 12-core 3.8GHz Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100; 16GB RAM; 1TB eUFS storage. Price: £1,699

The 16in Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is the more expensive of the models, as you’d expect. There are a couple of variants to consider: the 512GB model for £1,499, which comes with the mid-speed X1E-80-100 Snapdragon X Elite chip (3.4GHz with 4GHz Dual Core Boost), and the one I have on test here, which comes with the fastest X1-84-100 (3.8GHz with 4.2GHz Dual Core Boost). The 14in model, of which there is only one variant, is £1,399 and comes with the X1E-80-100, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of eUFS storage.

The most natural comparison to make here is with the M3-based MacBook Air – another slender, lightweight laptop, also with great build quality and based on an efficient ARM chip.

However, the Samsung has a nicer OLED screen than the Air’s IPS unit, performance is slicker in some regards, and prices are more reasonable. A 13.6in M3 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD costs £1,499 – £100 more than the 14in Book4 Edge – and a 15in M3 MacBook Air the equivalent of our review sample would set you back £1,899, a difference of £200.

If it must be Windows, then there’s a huge amount of choice available to you, but if you have your heart set on one of these new Snapdragon laptops, then the principal rivals are the Asus Vivobook S 15 (S5507), the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and the forthcoming Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen 9.

I’ve tested the Asus and the 15in version of the Surface Laptop 7 and those offer similar experiences. My pick for value is the Asus machine. It has a slightly less desirable design, but prices start at a highly reasonable £1,300 for a laptop with a 15.6in OLED screen, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. You can also pick up the smaller 13.8in Microsoft Surface laptop for only £1,049, albeit with the less capable Snapdragon X Plus processor, 16GB of RAM and smaller 256GB SSD.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge review: Design and key features

My overall favourite so far in design terms, though, has to be the Surface Laptop 7. Not because it’s as good looking or desirable – the Samsung is slim and light, and this 16in model impresses with its minimalist appearance and overall build – but the Surface, while heavier and chunkier, is fantastically easy to get inside and repair or replace key components. It’s worth making the compromise, in my opinion.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the engineering that has gone into Samsung’s latest laptop. As with previous Galaxy Book Pro laptops, it’s nicely made, with a sturdy all-metal frame, finished in smooth matte silver. The keyboard layout is a little fussy for me – at least it is on the 16in model – as it has a compact numeric keypad squeezed in on the right-hand side, pushing the whole layout to the left. I prefer not to have the numeric keypad for this reason, but your preferences may vary.

The keyboard is perfectly pleasant to type on, however – it’s a typical ultraportable laptop keyboard in terms of feel and layout. It has a three-stage, fairly even backlight, there’s a fingerprint reader embedded in the power key in the top right corner and there’s enough travel for comfortable touch typing.

The touchpad is great to use as well. It spans 50% of the width of the palm rest and almost the full height of it, and mousing on it is so good that I almost forgot that it isn’t a haptic pad, as found on the MacBook Air and Surface Laptop 7. It’s also nice to be able to reach out and prod the touchscreen from time to time, although for me this isn’t a killer feature.

Around the edges of the chassis, there’s plenty of practical connectivity. On the left are a pair of USB-C ports and an HDMI video output, while on the right you have a 3.5mm headset jack, a microSD card slot and one USB-A port. Wi-Fi 7 is supported thanks to the Qualcomm chipset, and charging is delivered via one of those USB-C ports and a compact 65W charger included in the box.

Aside from the humdrum practicalities, there are a few other features worth highlighting, particularly for users of Samsung smartphones and tablets. If you’re lucky enough to own one, you’ll be able to fire up a couple of preinstalled apps that let you interact with your mobile devices directly from the keyboard and touchpad of your Book4 Edge.

The first is the Multi Control app. This lets you drag your mouse cursor from the screen of your laptop over to the screen of your phone or tablet and control apps directly with your keyboard and mouse, enabling you to respond to messages without having to raise your hands from the keyboard of your laptop. There’s also Samsung Flow, which allows you to use the screen of your tablet or phone as an extension to your laptop’s display. That’s not much use for owners of an S24, S24 Plus or S24 Ultra, but if you have a Z Fold 5 or a tablet such as the Galaxy Tab S9 about your person, it will be handy for keeping Slack or email displayed while you work on a spreadsheet, presentation or document on the main screen.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge review: Display

The highlight of the Book4 Edge, for me, is its glorious 16in, 2,880 x 1,800, Super AMOLED Dynamic 2x screen. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but if you’ve had the privilege of using one of Samsung’s flagship smartphones in the past couple of years, you’ll know how good this is.

It is, quite frankly, astonishingly good. In terms of colour reproduction, it delivers more colours than the DCI-P3 colour space at 117.7%. It’s bright, peaking at 397cd/m², and its contrast ratio – thanks to that OLED tech – is effectively perfect. Colour accuracy is great, too. You get four colour profiles to choose between in the Windows settings – sRGB, DCI-P3, AdobeRGB and Samsung, plus an Auto mode – and all of them are spot on, with average Delta E colour variance scores of 1.34 for the sRGB mode, 1.36 for DCI-P3 and 1.38 for the AdobeRGB mode. Those scores aren’t the best we’ve ever seen, but they’re as good as you need for all but the most demanding of professional workflows.

Objectively, it’s a fabulous display, then, but it’s no better or worse than the OLED display on the Asus Vivobook S 15 (S5507), other than the fact that it’s a touchscreen and is slightly larger. It is, however, more vivid than the screen on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 – that’s a touchscreen, too, but as it uses IPS display tech, it’s less effective for viewing HDR content than the Book4 Edge.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge review: Performance and battery life

Of the three Snapdragon Copilot+ laptops we’ve seen so far, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is the most powerful. That’s because it has the top-tier Snapdragon X Elite processor inside: the 12-core X1E-84-100, which runs at a base clock speed of 3.8GHz and has a Dual-Core Boost clock frequency of 4.2GHz. The NPU is the same 45 TOPS unit found in the rest of the X Elite chips, but in terms of its CPU clock speeds, it outperforms the X1E-80-100 in the Surface Pro 7 15in and the X1E-78-100 in the Vivobook S 15 (S5507). The former runs at 3.4GHz/4GHz and the latter at 3.4GHz without support for Dual-Core Boost.

It’s also worth noting that not all Galaxy Book4 Edge laptops have this premium chip inside – just the top-end 16in model with 1TB of storage. If you step down to the 512GB model, you’ll get the marginally slower X1E-80-100 chip. Buyers of the 14in Book4 Edge have no choice in the matter: all models come with the slower processor.

There aren’t many benchmarks tuned for native ARM execution just yet, but I was able to run various Geekbench 6 tests, storage tests and battery life tests. Running these revealed a mixture of results. For performance, our review Book4 Edge, with the fastest chip inside, is a very quick, responsive machine, whether you’re running native ARM apps, of which there’s an increasingly large selection, or x86 software via the Prism emulator.

In terms of GPU grunt, it’s less of a powerhouse than the Apple M3 chip or the Arc graphics in Intel’s Core Ultra 7 chip but it is, again, the fastest of the Snapdragon laptops we’ve seen so far.

What’s most surprising to me, however, is that Samsung has chosen to equip the Galaxy Book4 Edge not with fast NVMe SSD storage but with eUFS flash storage. Presumably, this decision has been made to save money, but it puts the laptop at a disadvantage when it comes to writing large amounts of data to the drive. File reads are better, which bodes well for application launch speeds, but it still lags behind the competition.

The same goes for battery life. Although this has been a notable strength for its main rivals, with the Asus and Microsoft machines both lasting around 17 hours, the Samsung fell somewhat short of that mark, reaching a “mere” 13hrs 26mins. It’s worth bearing in mind that this is still very impressive for a machine with a large 16in touchscreen; it just isn’t quite as impressive as its rivals.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge review: Verdict

Those two small things put a dent in the appeal of what is otherwise a very appealing laptop. It’s well made, has a fabulous screen, is fast and responsive, and battery life is still great, albeit not quite as good as I had hoped it would be.

However, its rivals hold an edge over it, whether that be for pure value for money – the Asus Vivobook S 15 (S5507) offers more bang for your buck at £1,300 – or battery life, where both the Vivobook and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 come out on top. There isn’t too much in it, though, and if you choose the Samsung over those options you’ll still be mightily impressed.