Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge review: beauty before brawn

The keyboard is responsive but not attention-grabbing. I like that the keys are not too shallow and that they don’t make a lot of noise, especially for a heavy-fingered typist like myself. But they feel sluggish. The actual press feels slower and softer than I anticipated. I don’t outright dislike them, but after typing on the Asus Zenbook S 16 — a competing 16-inch laptop that’s nearly the same size and weight — I don’t want to go back to Samsung’s.

Disappointing performance

The Book4 Edge would be great for work, school, or any environment where all you need is a fast, reliable machine to handle the basics. The laptop opens programs a smidge faster than a lot of competing AMD or Intel-based machines, and it can handle a bunch of browser tabs or streaming movies just as well. But since Samsung prioritized design over performance, it passed over a chance to show off what Qualcomm’s fastest Snapdragon chip is capable of at its best.

The base Book4 Edge model comes with a Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 processor, but the higher-end model I reviewed has the X1E-84-100 chip, which is supposed to be up to 20 percent faster. It’s also supposed to be capable of boosting the max clock speed of two of its cores from 3.8GHz to 4.2GHz.