Published in Reviews

Qualcomm, ARM and Windows change the shape of notebooks

by on01 May 2018

Index

 

Conclusion

The most important thing that you should walk away after reading this article is that you cannot tell that this is not an Intel Core M based machine. We showed the machine to a bunch of people, and not a single one figured out that this is not an x86 machine.

This is the big win of this first-generation product. The battery life is rather great, it is fighting with premium class notebooks and it still doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Asus NovaGo is not a high-end machine, it is a mainstream unit that will help the casual customer work and have some freedom with the always-connected Snapdragon 835 and ability to surf even in a park. The $599 USD price in the US sounds reasonable while the European price of €799 for the same machine definitely sounds too steep. Bear in mind that the US machine has a tax on top of it and the EU price has 20 percent of VAT included in the €799 price.

SDdetail

Microsoft is very serious about Windows on Snapdragon and both Microsoft and Qualcomm spent a lot of resources to ship these first units. At the time of publishing, we got the chance to install the 1803 update, better known as the Red Stone 4, which again tells you how dedicated and serious Microsoft is.

Snapdragon on Windows 10 absolutely defeats the purpose for the existence of any Chromebook. Asus NovaGo Go runs WIndows 10 and all productivity applications. Chrome runs just Chrome things and is barely useful from our point of view. 

Asus NovaGo with Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 is a machine for people who need the modem, like a great battery life, like the 2-in-1 form factor and want its machine to be running proper Windows OS.

I call this product a great start but with a lot of unexploited potential. After trying the first generation of Snapdragon 835 running Windows, we can certainly get our hopes up for follow up devices. 

 


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Last modified on 02 May 2018
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