As part of Arm’s booth at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2022, we are recreating a home environment complete with a range of Arm-based consumer devices, including smartphones, tablets, a games console, a smart TV and Windows on Arm (WoA) laptops. Each device will be showcasing an in-house Arm AAA gaming title called the “Amazing Adventures of Dr. Arm”, displaying the pervasiveness of the Arm compute platform and the ability to provide seamless and consistent experiences regardless of the device.
Focusing specifically on WoA laptops, 2021 was another great year with the devices continuing to go from strength-to-strength. They not only provide a range of hardware benefits and features, but are part of a growing WoA ecosystem as more applications natively target the devices. At the same time, the user experience remains as strong as ever, with the three key use cases of enhanced creativity, productivity and entertainment keeping users happy whether they are at home or ‘on-the-go’ as the world opens up.
Before MWC 2022, we take a closer a look at the range of benefits and features for WoA laptops and outline the top five reasons why your next laptop should be WoA!
For the minimalists out there, the device aesthetics of WoA laptops do not get better than this. The devices feature ultra-thin, lightweight and fanless designs that look great and are easy to carry. For example, the WoA Samsung Galaxy Book S has a sleek metallic silver finish paired with a very low-raised grey keyboard and is one of the slimmest and lightest laptops out there. At just 11mm thick (with the lid closed) and weighing just under a kilo, you won’t even notice that the device is in your bag. Open it up and you will find a bright, sharp and vivid display with thin bezels around the sides. The display panel is also protected by glass to deliver a crystal clear and premium look.
WoA laptops stand out internally as much as they do externally. Not only do these have plenty of power to get you through any productivity, creative or entertainment task, but the Arm technology puts an increased focus on power efficiency for multi-day battery life. This means that WoA laptops are built to keep going on a single charge far longer than you might expect.
Productivity and entertainment applications are optimized to take advantage of this power efficiency. This means you could open multiple documents and presentations, while watching a TV show, and the battery would only drain a small amount of power. Perfect for finishing off an entire season of… important work. Yes, finishing important work…
The impressive internals of a WoA laptop do not just end with the incredible chipset. Connectivity is at the heart of the WoA laptop experience and you will find a SIM card slot in most WoA laptops, capable of connecting to the fastest LTE/5G networks available.
This is particularly good news for people living in regions where mobile networks are more accessible. No longer do you have to carry a dongle or use your phone as a hotspot. Plug your SIM card in and off you go!
Additionally, looking at the Samsung Galaxy Book S, the laptop has a subtle innovation: an SD card tray. This is the first time you can expand your laptop storage without having to take it apart or carry a bulky hard drive. It is fully inserted into the device and not protruding from the side as with most other laptops. Plus, when we say expand, we mean up to an additional 1 TB of storage.
Due to Arm’s heritage in smartphones, WoA laptops are truly mobile devices. This not only enables the connectivity and battery life benefits that we have highlighted previously, but also means users can move seamlessly between their smartphone and laptop.
Assisting this seamless transition between devices are built-in synchronisation features developed by the OEMs. For example, the Galaxy Book S comes with the Samsung Flow synchronisation tool pre-installed, which is good news for Samsung smartphone users. This means you can easily transfer files between your phone and laptop, receive and respond to your phone’s notifications on your laptop, and even have your phone screen up as a window on your laptop. Through this synchronization, when you are at home, you can leave your phone in the other room with the complete peace of mind that if someone needs to reach you, they can.
Most laptops will slow down and depreciate over time; however, with WoA laptops, it is quite the opposite. Since the WoA platform is relatively new and advanced, over time the app ecosystem will grow even further. During the last three years, great progress has been made with the WoA ecosystem. More applications are now targeting WoA, from mainstream productivity, creativity and entertainment applications, like Adobe Illustrator, Netflix, Kindle Reader, Amazon Music and Zoom to emerging applications, like Zinstall, StaffPad and Tweeten.
These applications will then have new optimizations to take advantage of all the performance and power efficiency benefits of WoA. In effect, as the years go on, you will see an increase in performance and value.
Recently, Microsoft joined Linaro – the open-source collaborative engineering organization that develops software for the Arm ecosystem – to advance WoA app development. It joins a team consisting of Linaro, Arm and Qualcomm that have been working together to build an ecosystem which supports native app development. Microsoft officially joining the project will help to accelerate the growth of the WoA ecosystem.
Moreover, the new Windows 11 update brings big performance boosts across the entire system. Users can take advantage of many new Arm natively built applications and full x86_64 emulation, meaning you can run all your usual/regular/popular apps on WoA devices. It’s a better time than ever to switch!
Among all the new innovative features that most modern laptops come with, security is an absolute essential that is often taken for granted. Security features across Arm’s architecture serve the whole technology ecosystem, from consumer devices like smartphones and laptops right through to infrastructure and IoT. The pervasiveness of Arm’s security offerings will provide an advantage for WoA laptops. This not only leads to secure and trusted devices, but also sets the benchmark for protecting data within applications and operating systems. IT administrators working in modern Enterprise can trust that the full spectrum of security requirements they need and expect for the management of Windows devices are met by Arm architecture products.
WoA laptops are truly mobile devices you would want with you everywhere you go, not only because they look good, but because they are specifically designed for being ‘on-the-go’. Every aspect of WoA laptops points towards comfort and a worry-free experience. No longer having to worry about battery life, how heavy a laptop will make your bag, about carrying an extra bulky hard drive, or even your laptop’s charger. WoA laptops are heading towards making large screen computing as comfortable as possible, so why not give them a try? Maybe starting with the Arm booth at MWC 2022?
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I have been using the Samsung Galaxy Book S for almost two years now. I agree the software continues to improve, including WSL2. I love the SIM card feature. The only real drawback is the keyboard, more difficult to type vs most laptops. Looking forward to a performance boost on the next wave Windows on Arm laptops.