Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin this is the Google pixel - one of the most advanced smartphones on sale today and it's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor now this laptop beside me is also powered by that same mobile processor and that actually is kind of a big deal you guys might remember the original Microsoft Surface now it was powered by Windows RT a specific version of Windows 8 that was meant to run on ARM processors which are typically found in your phone now there are some advantages here mostly with battery life but also some smaller things like being able to have quicker standby time however the biggest issue was was that it didn't run normal Windows apps which as you guys might know it's kind of important for a Windows computer now yes you could run stuff in the Windows Store but well no one wants to do that however on the surface this looks to be a much better execution of that whole idea and yes I said surface that was a bad joke wasn't it so this is the HP Envy x2 the very first and the next generation of Windows PCs that are going to be powered by Snapdragon processors and what makes these interesting is they actually do run Windows apps which is very important although it is with some caveats but with promises of 20 plus hours of battery life it might be worth the trade-off take a look at the specs and it's going to look a little bit different so it's powered by that Snapdragon 835 and it's backed up with four gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage you know the almost identical spec that you would find on a smartphone what makes this kind of interesting is that even though it is in a tablet form factor a lot of these Snapdragon PCs are going to be full-fledged laptops but because it's being powered by a phone processor as you can imagine it's going to be a little bit thinner a little bit quieter or well a lot quieter than pretty much any other laptop out there and so we see how to navigate the Windows Start screen which is useful as well as a bit of foam well the real store this show is the laptop and wow that's super super thin wow that actually looks pretty cool so this is very similar to something like the surface and the idea that for which everything is going to be in the tablet section but it does come with a keyboard which should be right so this is a little bit of a different design so it's almost more like a case for the laptop which just happens to have your keyboard as well as the trackpad but when you actually put the whole thing together snaps on here and then I think we can just pull it back yeah so we get a an adjustable kickstand and yeah that uh that kind of looks like a surface also included is going to be a stylus again kind of similar to the surface although the surface sectioning you think comes with the stylus anymore but as you expect or something like this it is going to be a full touchscreen device and that looks again exactly like the surface last but not least you're also going to be getting the power cable which thankfully is going to be USB C sorry not last but not least there's also a USB see the USB a dongle does this actually haven't USB ports that would be a no okay so this PC is going to be a little bit different from most no again the Snapdragon PCs will be available in normal sort of laptop form factors now once you actually get into Windows you'll find it well it looks exactly like Windows 10 now it does have some limitations because it is using a Snapdragon processor but on the other hand one of the big advantages here is that we actually do have built in LTE so if I slide a SIM card in here what we're getting here is essentially well exactly what you would expect with your smart phone that is because the Snapdragon 835 has LTE and all the radios and stuff built in it's as simple as adding a couple antenna putting a SIM card slot and you have a PC that in theory can be completely connected all the time at least when it comes to initial impressions the performance is pretty good on this guy just normal day-to-day stuff feels snappy this guy's ships running Windows 10s now that's fine but I think pretty much everyone is going to want to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro which is going to allow you to run third-party apps that are from outside the Windows Store now the issue here is though while this will run most apps it's not going to run everything it needs to be at the very least in x86 app so no 64-bit stuff and as far as driver support essentially doesn't support standard Windows drivers you do need to get specific arm drivers which at this point are basically non-existent however for most games most apps most programs they're at least going to work somewhat on here out of the box benchmarking the NV is going to be a little bit difficult so while it will run standard Windows that are x86-based such as Geekbench for the issue is running it in a compatibility mode now it means that it will work but you're not going to be getting that full performance and you can see that in numbers so take a look at the scores compared to a Snapdragon 835 phone which is running on native code you're seeing that you're getting a little bit less than half the standard performance it's fine but you do notice a slowdown but keep in mind that that's running in the x86 compatibility mode basically the lowest performance option that you can get on this computer if an app such as Geekbench is recompiled with Snapdragon in mind you're probably going to be getting much more similar performance though what you actually get on android however all that being said you have to keep in mind that while it's not gonna be crazy high-end you're getting pretty decent specs here I mean that's Snapdragon 835 is going to give you eight cores four gigs of ram it's no slouch one area this is really noticeable is when it comes to browsers so Microsoft edge is natively compiled to work specifically on Snapdragon processors so you're on the web everything feels snappy it feels pretty much one-to-one like it would on your phone or pretty much any other laptop however download a third-party browser such as Chrome or opera and things are noticeably slower rather quick JavaScript benchmark like octane 2.0 and you can see that edge absolutely destroys the opera's performance now part of that is of course due to the fact that there's some slight differences between how edge and opera perform but running in that compatibility mode while it will get an app to actually run on this guy really does mean it's going to take a big hit to the performance for me the difference is enough that I would rather use edge over any kind of third-party browser think even beyond the benchmarks you're really gonna get something that is going to be nosily slower when you do install something like Chrome or opera that just wasn't designed with this in mind it works but just not very fast but we do have the compatibility mode for a reason and in theory games will work although the idea of how well they work is probably a little bit questionable when you consider that this is a phone processor running an emulator for Windows apps that is yeah let's just try it first up I want to give csgo a try as a slightly older game it has the best chance of actually being able to run on such a low-end processor again I say low-end I mean obviously you can play some pretty nice-looking games on Android but Windows is a little bit more challenging your graphics hardware does not support all the features needed to run this game okay not a great start try something else hey okay so next we have a rocket League and this is a games that again should in theory be able to be run on some sort of Snapdragon Class hardware now the main question though is how the actual GP drivers are going to work because I mean this looks like normal well that's slow it's like slow rocket League might work though I'm not really entirely clear on how Microsoft is getting an x86 Windows app to run natively on an ARM processor so it seems like they're doing something to be able to actually maybe in elated or I don't know if it's some kind of like hypervisor or something but this actually looks like it might work no what's interesting to me is the idea that that's totally gonna go in great good job guys what's really interesting to me is the idea that this is definitely something that can be improved with software obviously there's going to be a limit on what a processor like the snapback and it's capable of but the idea is I'm actually playing a proper PC game here fully through emulation or whatever they're doing to actually make it work is impressive although maybe not the greatest experience in the world next I want to try a game that actually should run on Snapdragon the Windows 10 edition of Minecraft now the big difference between this and the steam games I was trying earlier is the idea that the steam games well they were just never meant to run this kind of hardware whereas this is something that actually I believe has actually been optimized to run an ARM processor if it hasn't I can't tell because the performance is pretty much on point to be fair I don't think anyone is going to pick up a Snapdragon Power PC with the intent of turning it into a gaming computer now there are a few things to keep in mind first of all this is the very first system that shipping so there's almost certainly going to be some more optimization and the idea this is going to be a pretty small lightweight system that is able to actually do all this emulation is impressive however that being said even in standard apps the performance just isn't as good as it should be you can definitely tell the difference between a native app and something that's going to be emulated it's good but there's more work to be done there are definitely some advantages with going with a Snapdragon PC though one of the easiest ones to spot is going into sleep so with an Intel system usually takes a few seconds between when you close the lid wait for it to go to sleep open it up whereas with this it's like a phone you hit the power button it goes to sleep hit it again it wakes up it's much much faster having built-in LTE is nice as well I think that's going to be a huge selling point for a ton of people and all Snapdragon PCs this as well as some of the laptops are going have it ready so what I need to do is drop a SIM card in and it's going to be up and running and it's nice to people they'll be always connected between LTE and Wi-Fi now that being said I'm actually not a huge fan of the MVX twos design in particular for me the tablet stuff it's nice but it's not that much smaller than just a normal 13-inch laptop but thankfully there are going to be Snapdragon laptops as well probably the biggest selling point is going to be the battery life so HP claims up to 22 hours of use on a charge or a thousand hours of connected standby which for a PC is totally crazy now this mostly thanks to the idea that the Snapdragon processor is usually found in phones and I mean even something that's going to be this small is going to give you a much much larger battery than any phone will however all that being said I haven't tested it yet so I don't know exactly how long it's going to last but if it gets anywhere close to those numbers it is going to be a game-changer a Snapdragon PC makes a lot of sense for someone who wants an always connected computer that can run Windows apps I'll be it a little bit slowly and has solid battery life now with the HP Envy x2 it's a good system but for me it's hard to justify the thousand dollar price tag it was someone in the neighborhood of like seven or eight hundred dollars I think I would be fine with it but considering that it's going to be a little bit not optimized right now it's very expensive and it doesn't even have the Snapdragon 845 yet which I'm sure is going to be coming soon it's kind of hard to recommend that being said I think there's a lot of potential and Snapdragon PC's so what do you guys think let me know in the comments below I will catch you in the next one