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 (Windows on Snapdragon) 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.
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Source : Lenovo Yoga C630 Review: Can Windows On ARM Handle A CES Roadtrip?
