and I have discovered the best Chrome tablet

that I have ever used.

It has amazing hardware.

It runs on an ARM processor,

so it has pretty good battery life.

It supports LTE, natively, on the device.

It actually works in tablet mode instead of the janky fiasco

that you usually get on Chrome OS.

If web apps don't cover all of your needs,

you can also use an,

you could also Windows Apps because, yeah,

the best Chromebook I've ever used

actually isn't a Chromebook,

and I'm not actually using Chrome.

It's this thing,

the Surface Pro X using the new Edge browser.

So here's a question.

Dieter, are you feeling okay?

(funky music)

Look, let's get this out of the way right at the top.

It's super important that you understand

that I am not telling you to buy this computer.

I am definitely not doing that because as specced,

this costs more than seventeen hundred dollars,

and even though there are some discounts on it right now,

whatever.

It's too expensive.

Plus, you know, I've already reviewed this computer

and I decided that the app problem is really serious.

It uses an ARM chip,

which means that there some app compatibility hassles.

So, why I am I looking at this again?

Well, there's now an official version of the Edge browser,

and more specifically, there's an official beta

of the Edge browser that uses ARM code directly

and of course it has the Chromium engine.

See, the ARM chip on this hardware

means that a lot of Windows apps run in emulation,

which kind of kills the battery life

and it slows down the apps,

and some apps don't even work at all, like Lightroom.

But, now there's a good Chromium-based web browser

that runs native ARM code,

and so what if I just used this thing to run web apps,

and what if instead of struggling with all of the hassles

that come from all that Windows emulation stuff,

I just treated this thing like a Chromebook

and only ran Windows apps when I really needed them?

Well, I'll tell you what if.

I did it and I think I learned some stuff along the way.

So the main thing is that this thing runs Chrome,

I mean, sorry, it runs the Edge beta browser

really, really well.

I regularly have 20 plus tabs open,

and it's really not breaking a sweat.

I especially love how easy the Edge browser makes it

to create apps out of webpages.

If you have a PWA like Twitter,

there's just a little button right in the URL bar

that you can click,

and other pages you wanna make an app,

there's no weird thing to find.

There's literally an option in the menu

that says, make this an app,

and you just click it and bang,

it shows up in your taskbar.

Also, the Edge browser supports Chrome extensions,

so all of the stuff that I'm used to using on Chrome

works before,

and you can grab those Chrome extensions

directly from the Chrome store.

So I went and I grabbed this extension called Chrometana,

which automatically redirects all Bing searches

to Google searches,

which means that you can actually use the Windows key

to search Google without having to deal

with installing a bunch of extra crap

on your Windows computer like you did before.

Last and maybe most importantly,

because this Edge beta is running on ARM code,

it just natively works, it feels faster

and I think I'm getting way better battery life.

Like, on the average, it was, like, two hours more

than I was before,

which is about where I expected battery life

for this computer to be in the first place.

Okay, so how does all that compare to a Chromebook?

In fact, let's compare it to

a really high end Chromebook, like my Pixelbook here.

Well, instead of the kinda janky Android apps

that you use in a pinch,

you just get really good Windows apps.

Like the Spotify app here actually works,

and like the play pause/button actually works.

It unlocks with my face,

so I don't have to punch in a passcode

or use a fingerprint sensor or whatever.

And it doesn't suck as a tablet.

Microsoft is really good at managing Windows.

You can put stuff in split screen,

you can move stuff around.

When you go to the overview screen,

everything flies around exactly where you expect it to be.

It also, unlike the upcoming Galaxy Chromebook,

has a three by two screen.

Stylus input is way better

'cause Microsoft has been doing stylus input for way longer

than Chrome OS has.

And, it also has better privacy defaults than Chrome does.

It's got a pretty good reader mode

that hasn't come to Chrome yet,

and Windows also has this Your Phone app,

which means that this computer works better

with Android phones than a Chrome OS computer does.

If there's one major downside to using

a Windows computer basically as a Chrome OS computer,

it's that getting setup on a Windows computer

still takes forever.

And you gotta wait for Chrometana to tell you

that she's setting things up, and blah blah blah blah blah,

whereas on a Chrome OS computer,

you basically can get logged in and doing your stuff

within a couple of minutes.

Okay, so this is a lot of praise for this computer

as a Chromebook,

so once again, I really feel like I need to emphasize

that you should not buy this computer.

It is too expensive and too limited for what it does.

But, I do think we can learn from this experience

of using it as a Chromebook, together.

Microsoft is no longer trying to take over the world

with Windows anymore.

They're making their software for Android

and they're making the Edge browser for Mac, and whatever.

Basically, Windows now is a platform

that wants to run as many apps,

as many kind of apps, as it possibly can,

and the benefit for Microsoft is that

while you're doing that it might convince you

to sign up for some Microsoft stuff,

like OneDrive or whatever.

So, you know, touchscreen apps?

Cool.

Web apps?

You bet.

Legacy Windows apps?

Sure, they'll run on ARM.

It might be a little bit messy sometimes,

but it basically works.

And if ARM processors really do start taking over

Windows laptops and Windows tablets,

it could show that there is a middle ground

between the slow, frustrating ARM Windows computers

that we've tried before,

and the very fast, very elegant

but very, very locked down iPad Pro.

This is not that.

Not yet.

I mean, it still doesn't run Lightroom.

But it proves that it's possible

and that honestly, it might not be as hard as we thought.

Hey everybody, thanks so much for watching.

Now, there is one Chromebook that I'm really interested in

coming up.

It's the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook,

and even though it doesn't have a three by two screen,

which is the best aspect ratio, yes it is,

it's worth checking out.

We've got a hands on of it.