- Windows 10 on ARM is still a thing,
in fact today we're going to take a look
at the new Yoga C630 from Lenovo.
It's run on Snapdragon 850 and here's the best part,
it's only $800 which for for some of you
may still be too expensive
but it's one of my favorite devices so far this year.
Today I'm gonna tell you why, stay tuned.
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We're gonna be doing a lot of stuff
on Windows 10 on ARM as well regular Windows 10 PC stuff,
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Now the Yoga C630 here is one
of the more interesting devices.
Like I said, it's $799, you can pick it up
at Best Buy right now and it's one of the first
Snapdragon devices I'm running that has 8 gigs of ram in it
which is actually a really nice change
from all the previous versions we've seen so far.
It's running a Snapdragon 850 as well
so it's actually a very good performer,
around a Core i3, we'll be talking a little bit more
about benchmarks a bit later.
One of the neat things about this laptop
is it's one of the first that's a true laptop/convertible
that turns into a tablet.
Sure we have the ASUS NovaGo,
I never even tried to review that device
because it's not one of my favorites out there
but this is actually a really, really good device
and that price point just brings it all together
and it's more about the comparisons
of what's available on the market there.
Well let's get into the pros and cons of this device as well
but first let's give a product tour.
Alright, taking a look at the outside,
it's a very clean looking device.
Aluminum design and chassis, no flex whatsoever,
really solid.
Get the Yoga label up there which is pretty familiar.
Coming around to the back you can see those hinges
so this is a tablet device as well
so this does fully rotate.
This is the new style hinge that they're using.
No more with watch-band hinge, which is kind of unique.
And it's nice and rounded.
I like the layered look, too.
I think it's actually a pretty handsome looking device.
They do make this as a Chromebook as well
but why you'd get that, I have no idea
but if you are interested you can get that.
There are subtle differences.
This one's better, obviously, has LTE
but their speakers are also better placement.
We'll talk more about that soon.
Looking at the left hand side here,
you can see the slot for the nano SIM card
so that goes in there.
You also have a USB type C port, that is 3.14 power
as well as a little LED for charging which is kind of cool.
Coming around to the right hand side
and we get a second USB type C port,
so again, this has something to do with the Snapdragon 850,
they are limited by the amount of ports
they can put on the Snapdragon 850.
That's something you will see improved
if they ever release newer chip sets, I'm just saying,
but you do get two type C's so that's really nice.
Same as the other side, no difference.
You can charge the device with that one as well.
A standard 3.5mm headset jack so they didn't get rid of that
which is good, and your power button
which also lights up, so this glows white
when it's powered on and charging which is nice
and if you hit 20% battery or lower,
well it turns orange which I think is really clever.
I'll be honest, you'll rarely ever see it.
We'll talk about battery life,
it's really impressive on this device.
Alright, taking a look at the display here.
Nice, thin bezel on the side and the top.
Quite a chin though there on the bottom.
I would've preferred a little bit more balance
but, you know, it's not so bad.
This is a 13.3 inch, full HD display.
It is touch and pen enabled.
The pen on this is extra, so if you want to get it,
it is an intrigue system
so you can use a Surface pen with it.
I will say this is one area of the device
where they do cut back on, so compared to,
say the new Samsung Galaxy Book 2,
this display is nowhere near as good.
It's not as high of resolution and the color contrast,
well, it's a little bit on the lower side.
I find the whites to be a little bit more yellow.
This is what you typically see
in Lenovo's lower end devices.
It's a good screen though, I really don't mind using it
but you can tell it's not the best on the market
and this is where they're saving some money.
Same thing when it comes to inking.
The pen doesn't quite drag as smoothly
as a Surface device, for instance, but it gets the job done.
But again, if you want a better inking experience,
Surface or a Galaxy Book 2 is a better choice.
It's worth noting you do have a 720p camera at the top here.
It's, well, it's a camera.
That's all I can about it.
It's not very good, but it gets the job done
if you absolutely need to make a video call
but again, you can tell it's where they made some cuts.
I turn to the deck though, this is where I really like
a lot that's going on here.
First of all, I like this placement of the Lenovo logo.
I think it's a pretty clever design
and it's not as hideous as in the middle
as some manufacturers do so you'll see Lenovo
doing that a lot more in their newer devices for 2019.
You do get two top firing speakers.
That's something you don't really expect
on this kind of device, I suppose.
So many companies put them on the bottom and the sides
and all this kind of stuff, but two top firing speakers.
Pretty good audio, not the best,
but if you look at how thin this device is
it's kind of forgiving.
Just really nice to have that there though.
When you flip it around, it works pretty well.
Obviously quad speakers are better for this kind of device
but at this price point, I'm actually really happy
to see this.
The Chromebook version doesn't have 'em on top
so much better design here.
This is also a really good keyboard.
Lenovo's typical smile key design works very well.
It is back lit with multistage lighting
so you can do that with a function key here.
Overall I really enjoy typing on this.
Again, it's a strong point of this device
which is super important for me,
who, I use this for writing a lot of time
and I just enjoy using it.
Looking at the track pad, very large size,
very smooth glass and precision drivers.
No complaints whatsoever, really nice design.
Finally for a bio authentication
you get a fingerprint reader.
No Windows Hello IR camera, which I would have preferred
but this actually a pretty good fingerprint reader.
It's read all the time, I don't get misreads on it
and it just works.
Alright, look at the bottom here, very clean design.
Just have a couple labels, you do have some screws
so yes, you can take off this cover
though you can't do a lot with it
but if you really wanted to pop off the bottom
to see the inside, well you could do that as well.
Okay, let's get into specifications and features here.
So we're talking 8 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM
which is kind of interesting because a lot of laptops
don't ship with DDR4.
This one has it.
There's apparently a version of 4 gigabytes, too
but Best Buy's selling this 8 gigabyte one
which is probably the one you should get,
especially at this price point.
Anyway, 128 gigabytes of storage or 256.
Again, I haven't seen a 256 out there
but this one here, 128 gigs of storage.
It is EUFS, so it is not NVME SSD.
That's coming maybe in a later chip set?
But this is pretty good performance here.
Around 800 megabytes per second for reads
and around 200/250 for write, so on the lower end
compared to NVME storage but still very good.
It's actually faster than some older Surface devices.
Now we're coming to the processor, Snapdragon 850,
so technically an eight core processor,
four big, four little.
And if you've seen my previous reviews,
I talk about how to benchmark it,
this is pretty tricky actually.
One way we do it is with Geek Bench
which can actually simulate ARM 64,
and in that regard it performs very well
so ARM 64 here is gonna be everything
that the Windows 10 operating system does,
all the inbox apps, the entire operating system,
running Office, all that is native to ARM on here
as well as all the apps in the store
or actually around 95% of them.
So when you take that in consideration,
that's what you're running this device,
well it's gonna perform like a Core i3,
almost like a Core i5.
It's very good performance.
It actually slightly beats the Galaxy Book 2
but that's probably more of an anomaly here of performance
but don't forget the Galaxy Book 2
has a higher screen resolution
so I wouldn't be surprised if that takes
some taxing on the processor itself
but it's a very good processor.
I really enjoy using this.
It's a significant improvement over the Snapdragon 835.
I know for some of you this won't be fast enough
but for me it actually is.
Now where the caveat comes into as well,
running Win32 apps, that is things you download
off the web that are executable.
Now in theory you wouldn't use the device for this, right?
You're going to stick to the store
but if you want to, say, install Chrome,
that's where you would have this problem.
So it installs, you could run it
but it's gonna perform more like an add on processor
or a low end Intel one, so sort of like the Surface Go
and it's not as good an experience
but it does run and it can get you by
but this is one weakness right now of the ARM system.
Now I should point out that this
is technically a software limitation that's solvable
so, for instance, Microsoft has already just released
a few weeks ago a new development kit for devs
that allows them to recompile apps to ARM 64
and there's already rumors that Microsoft
has committed code to the Chromium project
for a Chromium browser and I've heard Firefox
may be involved with this, too,
so you can expect some movement here
around ARM based browsers for this device
if you don't like using Edge.
But if you're okay with using Edge like I am?
Well this is a fantastic experience.
Now the really big selling point here for me
has been battery life.
So they're promising a little over 20 hours with this.
It does pack a 61 watt hour battery.
Put that in perspective, you don't really find
61 watt hour batteries in 13 inch laptops.
It's around 10 to 15 watt hours larger
than most laptops at this size.
That's because the Qualcomm chip set is so small
they can devote more battery to it
and this thing is absolutely incredible for battery life.
So I'm actually getting real world usage around 15 hours.
That's actually just using the device
and it's been really phenomenal.
It's actually really hard to kill.
Having said that, if you do run some apps like Slack
and you leave 'em running in the background
I have noticed some slight battery drain there
so it's not impervious, again, that's a software issue.
If you were just using this as a laptop?
This thing lasts forever, it's absolutely incredible.
Alright so there's two other selling points
besides battery life with this device.
One is instant on, so the idea here
is when you open the lid and you hit that fingerprint reader
this device just turns on.
It never sleeps, it never hibernates.
It's just like your smartphone,
you hit that power button, it comes on.
It's a really great experience
if you're always turning on and off a device all day,
you really appreciate the speed here.
The other thing, of course, is gonna be the LTE.
So this is a 4G LTE, it uses a Snapdragon X20 modem
which is very good speeds.
You can drop in a Verizon SIM,
an AT&T SIM and it just works.
It's really nice.
I've had no issues with it.
Data speeds have been very good
and I use this a lot when I'm traveling obviously
and that's really the benefit here.
I should mention it does have eSIM support.
It's actually a second SIM on the device
so you can run a physical SIM as well as an eSIM
and dynamically switch between the two.
There is an app that let's you go and buy data packages.
You can do that on a per day, per month
or even a per six month period.
It's not cheap but it's a nice option
especially if you travel globally,
because you can go to a different country
and buy a data package and it'll just turn on.
That's a really big benefit here of eSIM
so that's on here and it works very well.
Okay, let's bring it all in.
So Windows 10 on ARM is still growing a lot
but we've made so much movement here
over the last few months.
One area we need to see improvement upon
is gonna be app compatibility with things
outside of the store.
That should be coming with that new Windows development kit
that's out now.
If I had to summarize this device,
it's strong point is definitely going to be battery life.
It's just absolutely incredible.
It's also just really good using it
as a word processing type laptop
so if you love writing a lot,
if you're always responding to e-mails,
browsing the web, using Office,
well this device is gonna be yours.
Yes you can use a pen on it.
I would still not draw on it as an artist
but for taking notes it's actually okay.
It's also just got a really decent screen on it.
It's not too heavy, it's 2.65 pounds, 1.2 kilograms
so it's still lighter than most laptops out there
but really the selling point here
is that always connected ability, instant on,
4G LTE, as well as really good battery life.
Now at $800 it's not particularly cheap
but this is the lowest price we've seen
with this feature set for such a device
and I'm actually pretty happy about that.
To put that in comparison the Samsung Galaxy Book 2
is $1000, so $200 more than this.
Sure the display is better and it's a different form factor
but that's 200 bucks.
On the other end you get the Surface Go with LTE
which is a really fun device as well
but that's $679 plus you need the keyboard
so you're right at about $800 now.
That's a very different device.
It's 10 inches, it's smaller, but for battery life
it's night and day between these two
so you gotta decide what's more important,
the form factor or the battery life?
I'm really impressed though
with what Lenovo's pulled off here
and I'm really excited by these device categories,
the super thin, light computing device
and I enjoy using it a lot, too.
If you're a student or you're a worker?
Well this is something definitely to consider.
If you're a little bit on the edge with Windows 10 on ARM
well you'd probably want to wait a few more months
because there's gonna be some more exciting news there.
They're not gonna necessarily come down on price,
not all of them at least, but I do suspect
we'll see some more exciting devices in the future.
So there's a quick look at the new Lenovo Yoga C630.
Now if you have more questions about this
make sure you go check out our library.
I've done a lot of videos explaining Windows 10 on ARM
and how it all works and I'm sure I'll answer
a lot of your questions there.
But if I don't, leave a comment below.
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