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Samsung Galaxy Book 2 review: the Surface Amateur
Red Dead Redemption 2 improves some of my favorite parts of The Witcher 3
Worst Windows 10 version ever? Microsoft's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad October

Samsung Galaxy Book 2 review: the Surface Amateur

Posted: 26 Oct 2018 05:00 AM PDT

About two years ago, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 would be compatible with ARM processors, including Qualcomm's Snapdragon line of chips found in mobile phones. At the time, I wrote that this gave Microsoft a perfect opportunity to produce the ideal Surface Pro: a computer that's thin, light, always connected via built-in LTE, and has tremendous battery life. Microsoft has released several new Surface computers since then, including models with built-in LTE, but it has yet to produce one powered by an ARM chip instead of Intel's more power-hungry processors.

That's where Samsung's new Galaxy Book 2 comes in. The $999 Galaxy Book 2 is essentially the same kind of machine as Microsoft's popular Surface Pro: a tablet with a detachable keyboard and pen that runs the full Windows 10 experience. But the Book 2 is also one of the new Always Connected PCs that are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 processor.

On paper, the Book 2 is the Surface Pro I've been looking for: an always-connected, ultraportable computer that will last more than a full day away from an outlet. But, as is often the case, what's on paper doesn't always line up with reality.

6.5 Verge Score

Good Stuff

Thin and light design
Long battery life
Integrated LTE
Keyboard and pen are included

Bad Stuff

Windows 10 on ARM still has program compatibility issues
4GB of RAM is limiting
The processor isn't powerful enough for demanding work

To the untrained eye, the Galaxy Book 2 is virtually indistinguishable from Microsoft's Surface Pro. It's a thin tablet with a built-in, infinitely adjustable kickstand, a keyboard that magnetically attaches to the bottom, and a pressure-sensitive pen for writing and drawing. The Book 2 is roughly the same dimensions as the Surface Pro, right down to its 1.75-pound weight (without a keyboard).

One thing that is different is the display: the Book 2 has a 12-inch, 3:2 OLED touchscreen (with Samsung's Super AMOLED branding) that's pixel-dense and color-rich. It also gets bright enough to use the tablet outdoors. The screen is a little smaller than the Surface Pro's, but I didn't notice the size difference as much as I noticed the giant bezels that surround it, which are considerably larger than the Pro's already big bezels.

Other differences can be found on the sides, where the Book 2 has two USB-C ports, either of which can be used to charge the computer, and a fingerprint scanner in the upper right corner behind the screen. I prefer a face-recognition camera over a fingerprint scanner for logging in to a laptop, but it is fast and reliable.

Samsung has equipped the Book 2 with side-firing AKG-tuned speakers that sound rather thin and flat. They work well for conference calls, but using them while watching video or listening to music isn't very pleasant.

Included in the box is a full-sized keyboard with backlit keys and a large trackpad. It's a nice keyboard that's easy to type on, but its plasticky finish is nowhere near as nice as the Alcantara keyboards that are available for the Surface Pro. However, Microsoft doesn't include its keyboard in the box, which costs an additional $159 on top of the price of the Surface.

The same can be said for the Book 2's included S Pen stylus: it's a perfectly functional, pressure-sensitive stylus, complete with an eraser on the back, that's not quite as nice as Microsoft's $99 Surface Pen, but Samsung includes it in the box.

Overall, the Book 2's hardware is best described as competent: there are no major flaws or glaring issues, but the fit and finish of the materials are a step or two below what Microsoft offers. Given the price differences between the devices (an LTE-equipped Surface Pro with a pen and keyboard will run many hundreds of dollars more), most of this can be excused in favor of the Book 2.

Inside, things are a bit different. As I noted, the Galaxy Book 2 eschews the traditional Intel processor options for a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850, a modified version of the Snapdragon 845 found in many smartphones, that's specifically designed for Windows computers. It's paired with a scant 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. (There are no other options or spec levels to choose from with the Book 2.)

Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Specs

12-inch, 2,160 x 1,440 pixel OLED touchscreen
Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 processor
4GB of RAM
128GB of storage
8-megapixel rear camera, 5-megapixel front camera
2 USB-C ports, microSD card slot, 3.5mm headphone jack
11.32-inches x 7.89-inches x 0.30-inches
1.75lbs (without keyboard)
Windows 10 Home (in S Mode)
Available from Microsoft, Samsung, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint
$999

The Book 2 is one of the first devices to hit shelves with the 850, and it's the first one I've used. My initial experience with the prior generation Snapdragon 835-powered Always Connected PCs was less than positive: I ran into a number of app compatibility issues, and the performance was sluggish and frustrating.

Unfortunately, while the 850 is improved over the prior-gen chip, it still suffers from many of the same issues. The Galaxy Book 2 ships with Windows 10 in S Mode, which limits the apps you can install to what's in the Microsoft Store by default. But even then, I ran into several utilities I couldn't use because they aren't compatible with the ARM platform. Other apps that I could install, such as LastPass, wouldn't run and just crashed on launch.

It also doesn't take long to find the performance limits of the Book 2. While it can certainly work fine for light, casual work, as soon as I try to juggle multiple tasks and flip between a browser with a dozen or so tabs open, email, Slack, Word, and other productivity apps, the Book 2 starts to buckle under the pressure. Performance in Slack is so laggy and frustrating that I ended up ditching the desktop app and using a browser tab to access it.

The Book 2 will also hang and stutter when switching between virtual desktops or even when just trying to open the start menu and perform a search in Cortana. I'm guessing the 4GB of RAM is a big limitation here — even Samsung's own Galaxy Note 9 smartphone has more RAM on board — but it's also likely due to the processor just getting overloaded.

On the plus side, the Book 2 is silent because it has no fans, and it stays cool, even when I'm juggling a lot of tasks. And its battery life is great: while it doesn't hit the 20 hours that Samsung claims, I am able to use it all day at work and on my commute home without having to plug it in. I've never used an Intel ultraportable PC with this much battery stamina.

All of this makes the Samsung Galaxy Book 2 rather frustrating. It has a great, super portable form factor, long battery life, and built-in LTE, which should make it a great computer for road warriors. But then it's hampered by its processor platform and lack of RAM, which make it hard to work efficiently on. Those who only have to do a handful of tasks for their work might not have an issue with the Book 2's performance, but anyone that juggles a lot of web browsing with other productivity apps will likely hit the Book 2's wall rather quickly.

Samsung may have come the closest to making my dream computer, but the Book 2 just doesn't have enough of the pro I need to be my everyday computer.

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Red Dead Redemption 2 improves some of my favorite parts of The Witcher 3

Posted: 26 Oct 2018 06:03 AM PDT

When The Witcher 3 came out in 2015, it completely redefined what I expected from an open-world video game. CD Projekt Red's fantasy epic was not only huge, but it was filled with the kinds of details that made its world feel surprisingly real. Its structure made it feel like I was experiencing hero Geralt's life, instead of being pushed through a typical video game story. It became the game I compared all other blockbuster games to, my reference point against which all other huge open-worlds were judged.

With the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 today, I think that's going to change. Rockstar's latest release is very different from The Witcher in a lot of ways. It swaps violent high fantasy for a gritty Wild West, and its world is rooted in reality. You wield flimsy firearms instead of magical incantations or ancient swords. Even still, the games share a lot in common, in particular, a focus on seemingly minute details that all add up to create a dense, vibrant world that's rich with character.

Three years later, Red Dead's sequel has improved on many of the things that made me so enchanted with The Witcher. Here are a few examples.

The horses

Oh, Roach. Geralt's trusty steed was one of the more charming and more infuriating aspects of The Witcher 3. What made Roach so wonderful was that he was always there. Even if you couldn't see him, all you had to do was whistle, and he'd come running. It was a comforting feeling that your most trusted ally was always just one call away.

In practice, though, it didn't always work as intended. I didn't experience many technical glitches in my time with The Witcher 3, but pretty much all of the bugs I did encounter were related to my horse. Roach would run into a tree when I called him and not be able to find a way around it. Sometimes things were more extreme: Roach would mysteriously start levitating or find himself stuck in a wall. I loved the horse despite this, but he could sure be difficult.

As a game about the Old West, Red Dead Redemption 2 naturally includes horses as a prominent feature as well. There isn't one singular steed, though; instead, you can buy, steal, or find a fairly huge range of animals to befriend and ride. Surprisingly, this doesn't make you feel less connected to your horse. They aren't just nameless animals used for transportation.

For one thing, you can name your horse. I spent almost the entire game with a small creature called Peanut. One of the main reasons I stuck with her for so long — aside from the adorable name — is that you build a connection to a horse the more time you spend with it, which has real, tangible gameplay benefits. That relationship grows when you ride the horse but also when you feed, brush, or simply pat it.

A horse that likes you will run faster, be less easily spooked, have more stamina, and be able to hear your whistle from farther away. These horses can also die, which made me pay even closer attention to Peanut so I didn't lose her. The most important thing about Red Dead's horses, though, is that they actually listen. Unlike Roach, they'll always come when you call.

The beards

One of my favorite parts of The Witcher 3 — I even wrote a whole article about it — is that Geralt's beard would grow over time. It sounds silly, and it kind of is, but it also adds a real sense of permanence to the world. Part of the appeal of these kinds of games is their massive scope, the idea that you're on a huge quest that takes an epically long time to complete. Of course the hero is going to look a little grizzled after all of that.

Beards in The Witcher 3 had some limitations. Geralt couldn't grow a big, bushy beard, and even though you could visit a barber to clean up, there weren't a whole lot of options. RDR2 takes things much, much further.

For one thing, Arthur Morgan — the rough-around-edges lead of RDR2 — can grow out his hair and beard quite a bit. There are few points in the game where the story skips ahead a few weeks, and when you see Arthur afterward, his hair is touching his shoulders and a scraggly beard hides any semblance of his square jaw. You can also make his beard grow even longer if you purchase hair tonic, though I haven't tried this yet.

His beard and hair also grow very fast, which gives you a lot of room to play around with Arthur's style. When you go to the barber, there is a range of cuts that are largely dependent on how long his hair is. If he doesn't have the locks, he can't have the look.

Because hair grows so quickly, I found myself doing a lot of experimenting with styles, trying to stay in character with the grooming. When I was out in the plains, I didn't worry too much about stubble. But when it came time to head into town or rob a bank, I'd clean up to play the part. It didn't really make a difference for how the game played, but it added another layer of role-playing to the experience.

The baths

Somehow, the most enduring image from The Witcher 3 is of Geralt taking a bath. (There's even a figure of it you can buy.) In Red Dead Redemption 2, you can, once again, see a tough dude getting cleaned up — only this time it's an interactive, instead of a passive, cutscene.

At most hotels, you can spend $0.25 to take a bath, and the game actually asks you to push buttons to wash different body parts. It's strange, silly, and takes a surprisingly long time. Now it's time to wait for Arthur's own soapy action figure.

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Worst Windows 10 version ever? Microsoft's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad October

Posted: 26 Oct 2018 05:52 AM PDT

The Windows 10 October 2018 Update has been plagued by trouble.

In September 2017, Microsoft boasted that it had just released the "best version of Windows 10 ever." A year later, as Windows engineers struggle with the most recent release of the company's flagship operating system, there's a compelling case that the October 2018 Update is the worst version of Windows 10 ever.

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The month began almost triumphantly for Microsoft, with the announcement on October 2 that its second Windows 10 release of the year, version 1809, was ready for delivery to the public, right on schedule. Then, just days later, the company took the unprecedented action of pulling the October 2018 Update from its servers while it investigated a serious, data-destroying bug.

Also: Microsoft serves up 40 new Windows 10 bug fixes

An embarrassing drip-drip-drip of additional high-profile bug reports has continued all month long. Built-in support for Zip files is not working properly. A keyboard driver caused some HP devices to crash with a Blue Screen of Death. Some system fonts are broken. Intel pushed the wrong audio driver through Windows Update, rendering some systems suddenly silent. Your laptop's display brightness might be arbitrarily reset.

And with November fast approaching, the feature update still hasn't been re-released.

What went wrong? My ZDNet colleague Mary Jo Foley suggests Microsoft is so focused on new features that it's losing track of reliability and fundamentals. At Ars Technica, Peter Bright argues that the Windows development process is fundamentally flawed.

Or maybe there's an even simpler explanation.

I suspect a large part of the blame comes down to Microsoft's overreliance on one of the greatest management principles of the last half-century or so: "What gets measured gets done." That's certainly a good guiding principle for any organization, but it also leads to a trap for any manager who doesn't also consider what's not being measured.

Also: It's time for Microsoft to bring Windows 10 Mobile back from the dead

For Windows 10, a tremendous number of performance and reliability events are measured constantly on every Windows 10 PC. Those streams of diagnostic data come from the Connected User Experience and Telemetry component, aka the Universal Telemetry Client. And there's no doubt that Microsoft is using that telemetry data to improve the fundamentals of Windows 10.

In that September 2017 blog post, for example, Microsoft brags that it improved battery life by 17 percent in Microsoft Edge, made boot times 13 percent faster, and saw an 18 percent reduction in users hitting "certain system stability issues." All that data translated into greater reliability, as measured by a dramatically reduced volume of calls to Microsoft's support lines:

Our internal customer support teams are reporting significant reductions in call and online support request volumes since the Anniversary Update. During this time, we've seen a healthy decline in monthly support volumes, most notably with installation and troubleshooting update inquiries taking the biggest dip.

Microsoft has been focusing intently on stuff it can see in its telemetry dashboard, monitoring metrics like installation success rates, boot times, and number of crashes. On those measures of reliability and performance, Windows 10 is unquestionably better than any of its predecessors.

Unfortunately, that focus has been so intense that the company missed what I call "soft errors," where everything looks perfectly fine on the telemetry dashboard and every action returns a success event even when the result is anything but successful.

Telemetry is most effective at gathering data to diagnose crashes and hangs. It provides great feedback for developers looking to fine-tune performance of Windows apps and features. It can do a superb job of pinpointing third-party drivers that aren't behaving properly.

Also: Microsoft Windows zero-day disclosed on Twitter, again

But telemetry fails miserably at detecting anything that isn't a crash or an unambiguous failure. In theory, those low-volume, high-impact issues should be flagged by members of the Windows Insider Program in the Feedback Hub. And indeed, there were multiple bug reports from members of the Windows Insider Program, over a period of several months, flagging the issue that caused data to be lost during some upgrades. There were also multiple reports that should have caught the Zip file issue before it was released.

So why were those reports missed? If you've spent any time in the Feedback Hub, you know that the quality of reporting varies wildly. As one Windows engineer complained to me, "We have so many issues reported daily that are variations of 'dark theme sucks, you guys should die' that it's hard to spot the six upvotes on a real problem that we can't repro in-house."

In response to those missed alarms, Microsoft has added a new field to its problem reporting tool in Feedback Hub, to provide an indication of the severity of an issue.

Windows users can now flag problem reports by severity.

Time will tell if that addition helps or if testers will automatically overrate every bug report out of frustration. Even with that change, the recent problems highlight a fundamental flaw in the Windows Insider Program: Its members aren't trained in the art of software testing.

The real value of Insider Preview builds is, not surprisingly, capturing telemetry data from a much wider population of hardware than Microsoft can test in-house. As for those manual feedback reports, I'm skeptical that even an extra layer of filtering will be sufficient to turn them into actionable data.

Ultimately, if Microsoft is going to require most of its non-Enterprise customers to install feature updates twice a year, the responsibility to test changes in those features starts in Redmond. The two most serious bugs in this cycle, both of which wound up in a released product, were caused because of a change in the fundamental working of a feature.

Also: Top ten features in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update TechRepublic

An experienced software tester could have and should have caught those issues. A good tester knows that testing edge cases matters. A developer rushing to check in code to meet a semi-annual ship deadline is almost certainly not going to test every one of those cases and might not even consider the possibility that customers will use that feature in an unintended way.

Sometime in the next few days, Microsoft will re-release the October 2018 Update, and everything in the Windows-as-a-service world will return to normal. But come next April, when the 19H1 version is approaching public release, a lot of people will be holding their breath.