The Surface Book is now available to buy in the UK following its US launch back in October. Microsoft's convertible Windows 10 laptop is available from a number of retailers and, of course, Microsoft itself.
You
can grab yourself a Surface Book at Currys/PC World, John Lewis,
Selfridges and Harrods, along with Amazon and Very.co.uk. You can also
pick one up from the Microsoft Store online.
The
hybrid starts at £1,299 which will get you the Core i5 model with 8GB
of RAM and 128GB of storage. Shell out £300 more, and you'll get double
the storage along with a discrete Nvidia GPU in the base unit for extra
graphics grunt. The Core i7 models also carry that GPU, and come with
256GB of storage plus 8GB of RAM, or 512GB of storage and 16GB of memory
for £1,799 and $2,249 respectively.
If you're poised on making a purchase, don't forget that there's also
a trade-in offer currently running (until the end of this month) which
will give you up to £400 cashback for certain laptops and tablets
including the MacBook, iPad and older Surface models. Check out the full
details of that scheme here.
Slick Surface
The
Surface Book boasts a rather stunning 13.5-inch screen with a
resolution of 3000 x 2000 giving a pixel density of 267 dpi, not to
mention a truly slick overall design and a nifty new stylus capable of
coping with 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity.
The phone, from the front, does have a very similar look, with the metal edges and rounded corners.
But the rear of the phone has been rounded away (think the S6 Edge's front used on the back) in the same manner as the Galaxy Note 5, and it feels completely different.
On
top of that, Samsung's brought back the IP68 rating (meaning you can
dunk it in 1.5 meters of water for 30 minutes) that we last saw on the Galaxy S5 – but this time, with the more premium design of glass and metal.
It's
still a touch chunkier than other phones on the market, but it feels
good in the hand and the mix of glass and metal makes it feel like a
phone worth spending a decent amount of cash on.
Screen
Samsung's
stuck with the same 5.1-inch QHD Super AMOLED display on the Galaxy S7.
It's usually a bad thing when a brand doesn't add anything to the mix
for its phone from one year to the next (we're talking to you, Apple…)
but in this case, last year's screen was so nifty that there's no
further it could have gone this year.
Super AMOLED tech means
you're already getting great color reproduction and brilliant
differences between the light and dark elements of the screen – and the
results always seem to impress friends.
The
QHD resolution is pin-sharp too, meaning 1440 x 2560 pixels and closing
in on a resolution that's so sharp the eye can't ever see the pixels.
It
makes pictures and web pages, in particular, look smooth and clear, and
as OLED technology is self-emitting, sits closer to the glass too.
Always on display
While the display technology in the Samsung Galaxy S7 hasn't altered much, the way it's being used has.
Samsung's
decided that it needs another headline feature, and the Always On
Display seems to be it. You can pretty much guess what this is from the
name, so whenever the phone is in standby it'll either show a clock,
your calendar or some weird pattern.
In
fairness to Samsung it does add a level of gloss to the look of the
phone, but it does also draw power. The claim is that it's less than 1%
per hour, but that still adds up over the course of a day.
Storage
We're
still waiting for conformation on the internal storage sizes Samsung
will offer with the S7, but it seems that you'll be looking at 32GB of
space in most territories.
Considering Samsung offered 64GB and
128GB variants in the past, that doesn't seem like much of an offer. But
in reality it's more than enough, thanks to the addition of a microSD
card slot in the SIM tray – something Samsung fans have been crying out
for over the last 12 months.
However, while Samsung is claiming
that the performance of this card will be good (in the Galaxy S5 it
really slowed down the gallery when you had loads of photos on it, for
instance) there's a slight surprise here: it's not adoptable.
What
does that mean? Well, with Android Marshmallow on board the Galaxy S7,
in theory Samsung could have used the new Adoptable Storage feature to
take that card, encrypt it and make it part of the internal storage,
allowing you to install apps and such to it as you would the 'normal'
phone – essentially giving you a 288GB phone for not a lot more cash.
Camera
This
is an area that Samsung's going to have to do a lot of work with in
terms of spending its marketing dollars: the Galaxy S7 has a 12MP
camera, down from the 16MP in the Galaxy S6.
While that sounds
like a downgrade, in reality it's a big change for the better, thanks to
the fact it'll be letting in more light – 25% more, thanks to the 56%
bigger pixels being used.
There's
also less strain on the processor, as it doesn't have as large file
sizes to work with – so taking pictures is faster and sharper.
The
autofocus has also been hugely improved, with Samsung's new dual pixel
sensor technology offering lightning quick sharpness – it seems to be on
a par with what Sony's put together in the Xperia range, so should
result in clearer pics even with a shaky hand.
Battery
Power
fans will be pleased to find out that Samsung seems to have put a lot
more effort into the battery pack with the Galaxy S7 – boosting it up
from 2550mAh in the S6 (which was actually a reduction from the S5) to
3000mAh in the Galaxy S7.
While Samsung doesn't have the best
track record with power management in its phones, the combination of the
improved power management in Android 6 Marshmallow and more mAh to work
with could mean we've finally got a long-lasting Galaxy flagship phone.
OS and power
The Galaxy S7 is one of the first Samsung phones to jump to Android 6, which comes pre-installed on the handset.
That's
running on top of (likely) the Qualcomm 820 CPU and 4GB of RAM, which
means the S7 is able to handle really meaty tasks like stitching
together 360-degree video on the fly from the new Gear 360 camera.
Is
it too much power? Probably – and here's hoping the new Qualcomm
chipset doesn't suffer from the same thermal issues as its predecessor.
Game launcher
The
other big feature on show here is the Game Launcher, a sandboxed area
where you can store your latest gaming titles you've downloaded and get
access to a suite of tools to improve the experience.
For
the lower-power games you can shed framerate and processing to save
battery, and while in game you can lock the buttons, disable alerts and
even record footage of your gaming experience.
