Samsung reveals $999 Galaxy Book S laptop with 23-hour battery life

Samsung’s big Note 10 event came with a surprise reveal: the Galaxy Book S, an LTE-enabled laptop with a whopping 23-hour battery life.

The company unveiled the $999 laptop onstage at its Note 10 event in New York. It will go on sale in “select markets” later this year.

During its event, Samsung described the laptop as having the “essence of a smartphone.” The 13-inch laptop is meant to be “always-on” with gigabit LTE capabilities and weighs just over two pounds. It comes with 8GB of RAM and will be available with 256GB or 512GB of storage. To that end, it will also include a microSD slot for additional storage.

But the most impressive spec by far is its battery life. The Galaxy Book S battery will get almost a full day of use, according to the company.

According to Samsung, the company worked closely with Qualcomm and Microsoft on the laptop, which is a successor to last year’s Galaxy Book 2. 

The Galaxy Book S is among the first laptops to make use of Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform, a new system on a chip (SoC) specifically designed for always-on PCs. One of the biggest advantages of the 8cx, according to Qualcomm, is its ability to deliver significantly better battery life. 

Though the Galaxy Book S won’t have the “multi-day” battery life Qualcomm has said would be possible with the 8cx, a 23-hour battery life is still quite impressive.

Whether the Galaxy Book S is as impressive as Samsung makes it out to be is still unclear. Last year’s Galaxy Book2 also boasted an impressive battery life and Qualcomm processor, but was criticized by reviewers for lackluster performance. Stay tuned for a closer look and our first impressions of the laptop.