Intel launched its 11th Gen Tiger Lake mobile processors. It also announced its newest badge of honor for laptops: the Intel Evo brand, building on last year’s Project Athena program. And in tandem with Samsung, it unveiled the first 5G-enabled system to meet the Evo requirements: the Galaxy Book Flex 5G.
The Flex 5G is Samsung’s first 5G laptop, and it certainly looks nice. It weighs 2.7 pounds (1.26kg) and comes in a light “royal silver” finish. You can configure it with a 13.3-inch 1920 x 1080 display, up to 16GB RAM, a 69.7Wh battery, and up to a 512GB SSD. There’s a 13-megapixel “world-facing” camera to snap or shoot video on the go, a built-in S Pen, and a backlit keyboard.
The Flex 5G can come with either a Core i5 or Core i7 from Intel’s new Tiger Lake lineup. The new chips will bring unprecedented performance and power efficiency to thin-and-light systems like the Flex 5G, says Chris Walker, Intel vice president and general manager of mobile client platforms.
The laptop should have a “more efficient battery life” this time around, according to Samsung. It’s unclear quite what that means in practice, though. Like the first model, the Galaxy Book Flex 5G has a 69.7Wh battery. Back in May, it said the original Galaxy Book Flex would deliver up to 20 hours of runtime. When Engadget ran some battery tests for our generally positive review, that figure was closer to 13 and a half hours.
That said, Evo-certified laptops are required to have fast charging support that gives batteries at least four hours of power after just 30 minutes of charging. There’s no word on US availability or pricing as yet.
