When Qualcomm and Microsoft launched the Copilot+ platform featuring the Snapdragon X Elite processor, the one SKU that I had the highest hopes for among all the participating OEMs was the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge 16—because it would be the only one shipping with the fastest version of the Snapdragon X Elite. Now I have spent a few weeks testing this laptop using my typical daily workloads.
While I found the Book4 Edge 16 to be just as good as other Copilot+ PCs running the Snapdragon X Elite, it felt like too much compromise was made to enable the fastest Snapdragon chip with a 16-inch display. I will go through my thoughts on the design, performance and battery life of this laptop using the first three Snapdragon X Elite laptops I reviewed as a baseline for comparison.
Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 Design And Specs
The Book4 Edge 16 shares the same design language as the 14-inch model; it also has a smaller 15.6-inch sibling model that recently came out with the Snapdragon X Plus processor. The review model features a gorgeous 16-inch 3K AMOLED display, the exact same resolution as the 14-inch model. However, the 15.6-inch model features a 1080P LED display; that version claims a 27-hour battery life, while the 16-inch claims 22 hours and the 14-inch claims 20 hours.
The Book4 Edge 16 has just a 61.8 Wh battery, which surprised me since this laptop has a massive 16-inch OLED display and a higher-clocked processor than any of the other Copilot+ PCs released so far. These two factors combined would make you think that Samsung would use the largest battery of all the Snapdragon X Elite laptops, but it’s actually a good 10% smaller than the battery in the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7X, which has a smaller display. I believe that this may be the biggest weakness of this laptop, although it might be a limitation created by its ultra-thin design, which is admittedly striking. The laptop also lives up to its “edge” name, as I once managed to cut myself on one of the speaker grills when trying to quickly pull it out of my backpack in the security line at Heathrow.
Considering that Samsung is the world’s leading memory manufacturer, it made some other questionable decisions on this laptop. It bumped the storage to 1TB with the CPU upgrade, but kept the RAM at 16GB, which feels like a missed opportunity to differentiate from the competition by offering 32GB of RAM. Unsurprisingly, the Book4 Edge 16 is also well-equipped with connectivity, including a full-size HDMI port, which none of the other laptops I’ve tested thus far has. It has three USB ports: one USB-A 3.2 and two USB-C. My only complaint about these is that both USB-C ports are on the laptop’s left side, so there’s no way of charging the laptop on the other side, which can be handy at times. The machine also has a microSD card slot, which has limited usability for me, and I wish it were a regular SD card slot instead. (MicroSD is applicable only for drone pilots and people shooting on action cameras like the GoPro or Insta360.)
The keyboard is also unique among the Copilot+ laptops I’ve reviewed because it is the only one big enough to accommodate a ten-key numeric pad for easy data entry. This is critical for some people who do a lot of number crunching, and can be a dealbreaker for some users. This laptop is missing a feature I would’ve expected to see: a Windows Hello camera and presence detection. The lack of a Windows Hello camera might turn some people away since Samsung instead uses a combo fingerprint power button. This button is not in the greatest location, and I prefer facial recognition. That said, the button does come in handy when wearing a mask, which is why I think that both recognition methods are necessary.
In addition to the full-size keyboard, there is also a colossal touchpad that might actually be too big. I’ve had lots of trouble getting the left click to work because my hand rests so far to the right on the touchpad, which is not centered. One cool design feature I do appreciate is that you can open the laptop with a single finger, which is a remarkable engineering feat that many other OEMs still haven’t achieved. The laptop also ships with Wi-Fi 7, which gives it a bit of future-proofing, given that most routers today still use Wi-Fi 6E.
Galaxy Book4 Edge 16 Performance
When running laptop benchmarks, I certainly expected this one to be at the top of the bunch for single-core performance in tests like GeekBench—and it was. However, multi-core performance was lower than that of the Surface Laptop 7, indicating that there might be some limitations. I hoped to see some bigger numbers from the Book4 Edge 16, but I would say that the performance increase was marginal at best, and it might not be worth the battery-life hit for some users. This laptop was still quite the powerhouse for creative workloads, though it hobbled along for gaming like other Snapdragon X Elite machines. The thermals for the laptop were surprisingly good; it seemed like the larger chassis and fans did a decent job of keeping temperatures low, even while gaming.
Good Battery Life, But Not Up To Par With Other Copilot+ PCs
I believe that this might be the Snapdragon X Elite Copilot+ PC with the shortest battery life I have tested. I say that considering that it still lasted me through a full 10-hour flight without any issues, although I did notice it chewed through the battery when I was running high-performance tasks. After enjoying such game-changing battery life on the other Copilot+ PCs, I was a little surprised to see this laptop falling a bit short. I believe that a bigger battery would’ve bridged that experiential gap, albeit at the cost of additional weight and a higher literal cost in dollars. One way to improve battery life significantly is to ensure that the laptop is running in “balanced” mode instead of “performance” mode. You can easily toggle this with a performance button that’s nicely placed at the top of the keyboard. Standby power is still just as incredible as it is on most other Snapdragon X Elite notebooks.
All in all, this is not the Snapdragon X Elite Copilot+ PC you want for the best battery life; this is the one you get for the best performance. That said, we don’t know how it stacks up against comparable models using AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series or Intel’s Lunar Lake processors; both will be coming soon, and I’m excited to compare them.
The Galaxy Book User Experience
One of the things that made this laptop so compelling to review was that I wanted to see how deeply Samsung integrated its Galaxy ecosystem with the PC to make for a better user experience. I went through and tried all the applications within the suite and found only a few of them to be useful; the rest I could have gone without.
First, the useful ones: the Notes app is quite good if you’re already a Galaxy smartphone user, and so is the screen recorder for easily recording your own videos. Multi-control is an interesting app that feels like it would be more useful if you were deeper into Samsung’s ecosystem and owned a tablet, a PC and a smartphone, but when it’s just a smartphone and a laptop it feels less powerful since Phone Link allows you to do the same thing. The most useful application is the shared copy-paste feature that automatically stores images you’ve screenshotted on your phone or PC and makes them sharable on either. I think I enjoyed this feature the most and got the most use out of it.
As for all the other apps—Samsung Account, Quick Search, Samsung Gallery, SmartThings, Live Wallpaper and Samsung Studio—I found them to be either completely unnecessary or redundant with better free software. I think Samsung would be better served to give customers a choice during setup of which apps they want to keep rather than making all of these default choices.
The Competition For The Galaxy Book4 Edge 16
Obviously, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is competing simultaneously with other Snapdragon X Elite laptops and Apple’s MacBook. Since this is an ultra-thin and ultra-light notebook at only 3.4 pounds, it should be compared against Apple’s 15-inch M3 MacBook Air (3.33 pounds). The easiest comparison is against the 16GB model, which costs $1,700, while the Book4 Edge 16 starts at $1,449 and is $1,749 as tested. However, the Samsung has 1TB of storage, whereas the MacBook has only 512GB. Additionally, the Samsung has a 16-inch OLED display, while the MacBook Air’s display, besides being an inch smaller, is only an LCD. While the two displays have almost identical resolutions, the Samsung OLED has a 120-hertz touch screen, while the MacBook Air is still stuck in touchless 60-hertz land. Interestingly, even Apple put a bigger battery in its M3 MacBook Air (66.5 Wh), which makes me think Samsung really underprovisioned this laptop with the 61.8 Wh battery.
Overall, the Book4 Edge is more competitive in both performance and features than the MacBook Air 15, although it would be my recommendation to not splurge on the absolute top SKU but rather opt for the 16GB + 512GB variant with the slightly slower processor. I believe that model will probably perform almost identically to the MacBook Air, have better battery life and save you a few hundred dollars.
Compared to the other Snapdragon X Elite notebooks, the Galaxy Book4 Edge is without a doubt one of the more premium designs with a ridiculously thin form factor and the biggest display. There are other OLED displays (from Dell on the XPS 13 and Lenovo on the Yoga Slim 7x), but again, the OLED touch panels do affect battery life. I believe that since many of the competing models are 14-inch notebooks, this comparison is a little tougher to make, That said, Samsung’s 14-inch variant of this notebook is the lightest of all the Snapdragon X Elite notebooks available today and should be very competitive on performance and battery life, even with a small-ish battery.
Who Should Get This Laptop?
I think this laptop is great for someone who travels, because even though it’s a 16-inch model, it has no problems fitting in the 15-inch laptop slot in my backpack. It’s surprisingly portable for a 16-inch machine, and has all the performance characteristics that you’d expect. Yes, the Arm processor inside does have some compatibility issues with some software, but that is improving with each passing month. During the month that I tested this model, I only encountered a software conflict once with Adobe Premiere Rush. Otherwise, it has been a reliable and long-lasting notebook in most scenarios and held up well when I was working on a 10-hour flight back from Europe. Heck, even as a 16-inch notebook, it comfortably fit on the tray table and made for a great content consumption device thanks to its gorgeous OLED screen.
If you’re looking for a laptop that’s light, long-lasting and has a gorgeous display, I would recommend the Galaxy Book4 Edge 16—just probably not the top-spec model with the fastest CPU and 1TB of storage.
