Always Connected PCs - The first Windows on ARM products

On Dec 5 at the Qualcomm SnapDragon Tech Summit in Hawaii, Terry Myserson of MS along with Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm announced the first two "Always Connected" PCs from MS partners HP and Asus.

These devices that were first mentioned and demo'd back at the WinHEC conference in Shenzhen China nearly a year ago and now coming to fruition.  Along with HP and Asus, Lenovo also announced a product coming in early 2018.

All of this aligns with my prediction that these devices will be available by the time of the Windows 10 Redstone 4 branch milestone in March of next year.

Both the new Asus NovaGO and HP Envy X2 devices are powered by Qualcomm 835 processors with LTE connectivity.   The NovaGo is a 2-in-1 laptop format and supports 1 Gbps LTE while the HP is more of a Surface style tablet with 4G LTE.   The HP however also supports Pen Input.  Both units support Windows Hello.

Both units claim battery life in the 20+ hr range along with support for 32bit Windows apps.   Both units by default will come with Windows 10 S - the Store limited version of Windows and will obviously support apps like MS Office.

HP did not announce a price, but Asus showed a 6GB RAM unit with 256GB of Storage for $799 and a 4GB unit with 128GB for $599.   Neither unit is available today and will probably not be until sometime in February or March of 2018.   

So the key attribute of these new devices is the "Always Connected" approach.  So just like your Smartphone today - you leave the device on do things like turn off the screen but the unit stays live and connected via LTE.  

For years I have installed WWAN Mini-PCI or M.2 cards in my laptops to support a higher level of mobility - so I am very familiar with the approach - the big difference obviously is that this is built in from day 1 and fully integrated.   And just like your phone there can be the whole WiFi to LTE hand-off that occurs.  These are SIM free devices - and so the option may also be there to maintain multiple carrier e-SIMs for travel.

One point made during the announcement is very true.  With 5G LTE and beyond, the need for WiFi is going to slow down.   Sure WiFi is great - with modern 802.11AC based devices you can have great speed.   But in the next 3 years - you'll easily get 1Gbps + over LTE.  And so even demanding apps like gaming, streaming, real time collab will all be easily possible.   Add to that the potential that by 2020 we will probably see 2 - 3 day battery life and that becomes compelling.

One thing that was not mentioned in any of the reviews was if MS would include a "Phone" app in Windows 10 S and allow you to also make calls.   Early versions of Windows 10 did include a Phone app - but I have not seen it recently. There is a Messaging app and MS may simply default to Skype as the primary phone app.

Not that your primary use would be as a phone, but for collaboration it might be interesting.   

One thing to note here is that the first devices were partner based and not a Surface branded device.  I also know from conversations as various tech conferences that another big brand Dell is not going to produce one of these right off.   

So the real question is - would you buy one ?

For me - my initial answer for the two models announced is no.  But only because Qualcomm just announced the SnapDragon 845 which is some 30% more powerful than the 835 that these two initial devices were based on.  

I use a Google Pixel 2 XL as my phone based on the Qualcomm 835 and the unit is very fast and I could easily see a PC based on the 835 running a portfolio of what I describe as core applications - so Office, Box, Slack, Trello, etc as well as the MS apps like Groove, Movies & TV and the MSN apps like News, Money, Weather & Sports.  I can easily see the ability to watch movies, post content, draw, etc.   

As several reviews have stated - would I run Adobe PhotoShop or some other CPU/GPU intense app and expect high performance - no.  But the question is should I ?

With that said - the one thing that is happening again is some serious progression on the CPU front whether traditional x86 or ARM.  I can see these new devices being very much like phones - were every two years - you're going to want the new one simply because of the dramatic speed and performance improvements.

Bottom line is that we now have a Qualcomm SnapDragon + LTE based Windows Laptop/Tablet option running full Windows 10.  It certainly has the potential to be an excellent choice for many use cases.  

The real question will be - will it sell ?