14 DAY TRIAL // Always Connected PCs are now a real thing, as Microsoft officially unveiled the Windows on ARM project with help from HP and ASUS.
And while these PCs are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 processor, which is also available on mobile devices, not the full feature set is being offered, as the chipset has been specifically optimized for desktop computers.
As Neowin discovered, one of the features missing from PCs powered by the Snapdragon 835 chip is 802.11ad Wi-Fi, as the integrated Wi-Fi + WCN3990 companion chip offers 2x2 802.11ac with Mu-MIMO peak speed at 867 Mbps.
Then, there’s no wireless charging, a change that more or less makes sense on a laptop, though it would certainly come in handy with the proper hardware, and no fast charging, as Qualcomm has apparently removed Quick Charge 4 support from the chipset.
NFC nowhere to be seen but it’s there
A bit more surprising is that NFC support is also missing from the official spec sheet, but Qualcomm told the cited source that this feature is available, only that it’s not included in the official documentation.
On the other hand, the Snapdragon 835 chipset available on Always Connected PCs supports Bluetooth 5, with a peak speed of 2 Mbps, as well as 6 different satellite systems for location services, namely GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, QZSS, and SBAS.
The rest of the specifications are pretty much the same with the mobile sibling, with X16 cellular model that can reach 1Gbps download speed, Kyro 280 CPU that tops at 2.45 GHz, and Adreno 540 GPU.
The chipset, however, has been optimized for long battery life, and Microsoft claims that devices powered by the Snapdragon 835 and running Windows 10 can achieve one week of battery life per charge. On average, these laptops offer around 20 hours of active use per charge, but this obviously depends on a lot of factors, including the software that’s running on the computer.