Samsung is stepping up its laptop game in 2020 by expanding its Galaxy Book line with a new, lower-cost addition. The Galaxy Book Flex Alpha is a thin and light 13-inch notebook with a QLED display that will cost $830 when it retails in the first half of 2020.
The Alpha joins two other Samsung laptops scheduled to go on sale early this year—the previously announced Galaxy Book Flex and Galaxy Book Ion. Like those models, the Alpha will feature an innovative QLED touch screen, the first of its kind on a laptop. Samsung says the display is capable of producing more than a billion colors, and it has an extraordinary rated brightness of 600 nits.
Unlike OLED screens, which have taken the laptop market by storm over the past year, QLED displays use familiar LCD panels and LED backlight arrays. The difference is their quantum dots, Samsung’s marketing term for nanoparticles that emit or alter light at different frequencies when exposed to electricity. This light-tweaking can produce more precise color in a wider range than the LCDs illuminated by white LEDs can.
The QLED screen in the Alpha sports a full HD resolution of 1,920-by-1,080 pixels. Higher-resolution UHD and 4K displays won’t be available.
The specs of the Alpha will come with a 10th-generation Intel Core i5 in its entry-level configuration, along with 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. Higher-end configurations will offer a 512GB SSD, 16GB of memory, and an Intel Core i7 processor with Intel UHD Graphics.
The rest of the specs list is fairly straightforward. You’ll get WiFi 6 support, tenth-generation Intel Core processors and stereo speakers. Since Samsung hasn’t given a more specific availability window than “the first half of 2020,” there seems to be plenty of time before you have to decide which of the QLED Galaxy Books you want to get.
