Samsung had quite a lot of surprises at its virtual “Unpacked” event, and the latest variety of laptops and Chromebook are premier among them. The company has many Galaxy Books among its product category. This review is about the Galaxy Book Pro and the Galaxy Book Pro 360.
The Galaxy Book Pro is a standard clamshell laptop while the Galaxy Book Pro 360 is a convertible that supports Samsung’s S pen. This pen is 2.5 times thicker, and according to Samsung, it prevents hand cramping.
Light in Weight
Both of them are very light and come in 13.3 and 15.6-inch sizes. The 13-inch Galaxy Book Pro is just 1.92 pounds. This means it’s going to be one of the lightest laptops you could buy of any size anywhere. The larger Galaxy Book Pro is 2.3 pounds.
Screens
The Book Pro has an AMOLED screen and the Book Pro 360 has what Samsung calls, a super AMOLED screen. This is a touch screen that Samsung says is brighter
and consumes less power than a traditional OLED. Most laptop screens are LCD panels, which means the whole panel is illuminated by one LED backlight. What makes OLED panels great is that every pixel provides its own illumination. So that means OLED panels can usually provide blacker blacks and better contrast ratios than any other laptop screen that you’ll see. Though they also tend not to be quite as bright. These Galaxy Books will be among very very few 13-inch laptops that offer this OLED technology. So the screens were both pretty glossy and did kick back some glare.
Processor
On the inside, all four of these devices contain Intel’s newest 11th gen core processors. Samsung worked with Intel to certify all of these devices through Intel’s Evo program. This means that Intel vouches that a new laptop meets various standards that are most important to users. So that includes all-day battery life, quick boot time, general responsiveness, etc.
One thing to note is that you can’t configure the Galaxy Book Pro with a discrete GPU. All the models come with Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics. These integrated graphics are good. They can run whatever games you would want to play at pretty good frame rates, provided that you bump the settings down. But they’re not what you’d buy for professional video work for example. So that doesn’t make the Book Pro a bad laptop, but it does mean that the Pro name is a bit misleading. It’s not targeting high power users, so much as amateur graphic artists and other average Joes who just want a really nice screen.
Storage
The Galaxy Book Pro can come with a CORE i5 or a CORE i7. You can go up to eight gigabytes of RAM on the 13, and 16 gigs on the 15. These both go up to 512 gigabytes of storage. And that’s an NVMe SSD. You have one Thunderbolt 4, one USB type C, one USB 3.2, an audio jack, and a micro SD slot. And then the 15 inch also has an HDMI. And both of these have a fingerprint sensor. Now, the Pro 360 is a bit more pro than the regular Book Pro in a couple of ways. So it has the same processor options, a CORE i5 and a CORE i7, but both the 13-inch and 15-inch 360 model comes with up to 16 gigs of RAM.
The 13-inch comes with up to 512 gigs of storage. And the 15 goes all the way up to a terabyte. The 13-inch also supports 5G, though your mileage with that will vary based on where you are. Both models have one Thunderbolt 4, two USB type C,
an audio jack, and a micro SD.
Price
The Galaxy Book Pro 13 starts at $999 and the Pro 15 starts at $1099. The 360 models start at 1199 and 1299 respectively. You’ll be able to pre-order both the Galaxy Book Pro and the Galaxy Book Pro 360 today, April 28th, and they’ll ship on May 14th. So both of these models are lightweight ultraportable laptops with good screens, and they’re coming from a company that’s very good at making lightweight ultraportable laptops with good screens.
So far so good
But the question is gonna be, how well these laptops execute on the other fundamentals. Like battery life, performance, and audio quality. After all, for consumer laptops at the $1,000 price point, you want the standout feature to be a bonus, not something you have to sacrifice other things to get.
