Author: Michael Crider / Source: reviewgeek.com
The Yoga C630 is a portentous little laptop: not because it’s loaded with overpowered technology, but because it isn’t. It’s the new flagship of the WOS platform—full, Windows-powered laptops running on the ARM Snapdragon chips primarily seen in smartphones.
This Lenovo ultraportable isn’t the first WOS laptop, but it is the first one with the Snapdragon 850 system-on-a-chip. Qualcomm says it’s designed this chipset specifically for full laptops. With looser space and thermal requirements, it should have better performance and longevity than the initial WOS designs.
Which is all well and good. But if you’re looking for a low-power Windows laptop over, say, a more expensive Chromebook or iPad, what you want to know is this: can it do all of the things a regular Windows laptop can? Can it, in a nutshell, just work? I thought this was a question worth answering, and with the Consumer Electronics Show fast approaching, I had an ideal place to find out.
CES: Snapdragon’s Trial By Fire
For the uninitiated, CES is one of the largest yearly trade shows in the world, and the biggest gathering of technology industrialists, investors, salespeople, and media like me. It’s a week-long slog through the casinos and convention halls of Las Vegas, meeting hundreds of people a day, snooping through floor booths, hot-footing it from one presentation or press gathering to another.
Most of my time at CES was spent alone or with a small team with no easy place to recharge, and more or less the same needs for daily writing, research, Photoshop, and image uploading as my normal job. It was a great place to see if the Yoga C630 (and by extension, the WOS platform) could handle my fairly typical mobile computing needs as well as my trusty, rusty ThinkPad.
For five days I used the C630 as my primary work tool, writing posts, researching specifications, firing off replies in Gmail, editing and uploading photos, and just generally doing the usual shuffle around the web that occupies too much of my time. Here’s how it went.
Sayonara, S Mode
I checked out the C630 in a less strenuous environment at home for a couple of weeks first, getting the hang of its quirks before the big show. And since Lenovo quotes its nigh-unbelievable 22-hour battery life with the laptop running in Windows S mode, I tried to get my job done with those restrictions in place.
Sadly, this meant I couldn’t install either Chrome or Photoshop, the two most crucial software tools in writing for Review Geek and How-To Geek. I tried to muddle through using Microsoft Edge and online photo tools, but eventually, it became too much of a hassle just to use the WordPress interface that runs our sites.
I had to disable S Mode and get my beloved Photoshop and Chrome (and all the extensions I rely on) back. This can be problematic: Snapdragon-powered Windows machines can only run 32-bit Windows programs, not the more memory-efficient 64-bit, and those that aren’t natively programmed for ARM chips have to run via software emulation. This is a surprisingly seamless process, and with S Mode turned off I didn’t see any real difference in the familiar installation and running of both programs.
As someone who frequently has dozens of tabs and a handful of Photoshop items open on my massive desktop, I was surprised at just how stable the little machine was. They were both slower than they might be on an Intel-powered machine, but that’s something I was expecting. And to be honest, the performance wasn’t any worse than it would have been on, say, a $300 Windows laptop bought from Walmart. The C630 is $$860-1000 depending on options. But the value proposition isn’t as lopsided as it might seem, since it’s sleek, long-lasting, and comes with a smartphone-style LTE connection standard.
The only part of my regular workflow that I couldn’t use on the laptop was Dropbox. The fast-syncing Dropbox desktop app won’t work on ARM chips for love nor money, and I had to rely on the Windows Store version instead: which doesn’t do live syncing, and is basically a bad copy of the smartphone app.
I used the web interface when I had no other option. Be aware of this if you constantly rely on Dropbox, since the company doesn’t seem interested in supporting Windows on ARM. It’s not a deal-breaker for me, but it might be fore you. It’s unlikely, but possible, that some small but crucial tool might not be available to you on WOS.
Pounding the Pavement
Based on my fitness tracker, I…
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