Samsung galaxy book pro 360 15

Samsung takes thin-and-light laptops to a whole new level with the Galaxy Book Pro 360. Available in either a 13-inch screen size or the 15-inch one we're looking at here (starts at $1,299; $1,499 as tested), this 2-in-1 convertible laptop is among the most “ultra” of the ultraportable laptop category. Samsung manages to fit a roomy Super AMOLED touch screen, a 360-degree hinge, an 11th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, and unique software features into a laptop that weighs just 3 pounds. It's arguably the best Galaxy laptop yet, but it faces stiff competition from slightly larger and more powerful 15-inch 2-in-1 laptops like the HP Spectre x360 15, which retains top honors in this category. Still, this is a great big-screen convertible, if that form factor is your thing.

A Vivid AMOLED Screen...But No 4K

A 3-pound weight might not seem that impressive, considering that there are plenty of ultraportable laptops out there that tip the scales at as little as 2 pounds. But most of these other notebooks have 13-inch or 14-inch screens and lack the extra hardware required for a 360-degree screen hinge. Not only can the big Galaxy Book Pro 360 rotate 360 degrees, letting you use it as a tent, an easel, or a tablet, but it also has a roomier screen that measures 15.6 inches on the diagonal.

And what a screen it is (or could be, were it not for one puzzling omission). This is Samsung’s first Windows laptop with an AMOLED panel. After making its debut on Galaxy mobile devices and the Galaxy Chromebook, the technology is ripe for advancement among mainstream laptops. Similar panels have shown up in a few laptops from competing manufacturers that we’ve tested recently, including the Spectre x360 15, and they’ve mostly offered stunning picture quality. Dell is also rolling out OLED screen options to its premium XPS lineup, including the smaller XPS 13.

You only need to spend a few minutes gazing at the Galaxy Book Pro 360’s AMOLED pixels to appreciate how much more vivid they are than those of the average LED or LCD screen. They can display 100% of the P3 color space, and offer far deeper blacks than I’m used to seeing thanks to a sky-high contrast ratio. AMOLED screens achieve all of this by lighting pixels via a self-emitting organic layer instead of a separate backlight. When electric current is applied, the red, green, and blue subpixels become their own source of light.

Samsung calls the display in the Galaxy Book Pro 360 a Super AMOLED panel because it incorporates touch support directly into the screen, instead of via an additional capacitive layer that adds bulk. I appreciate that an improved S Pen digital stylus is included with all Galaxy Book Pro 360 configurations, so you can take full advantage of the touch support. The new S Pen is smaller than most digital styli, but it’s easy to hold in one hand, has a ridge to prevent it from rolling off the desk when you’re not using it, and snaps magnetically to the back of the laptop’s display lid for temporary storage.  

There’s one key drawback to the Galaxy Book Pro 360’s screen: You can’t get it with a 4K resolution. This is puzzling to me, since 15-inch 4K AMOLED screens exist already, and they offer far crisper text than the full HD resolution of the Galaxy Book Pro 360’s screen. Larger screens benefit even more from higher resolutions than smaller ones do, and it’s a shame that Samsung isn’t at least offering a 4K version of the Galaxy Book Pro 360 as an option. 

Sure, the Galaxy Book Pro 360’s 3-pound weight is impressive, but perhaps even more stunning is how thin and gorgeous the chassis looks when it’s closed. The laptop stands just 0.47 inch tall—compare that with the 0.6-inch height that is a common thickness measure for other ultraportable laptops. The Galaxy Book Pro 360’s slimness gives it classiness in spades, and so does the unique deep-blue color scheme of our review unit. Samsung calls it Mystic Navy, and it’s far and away my preferred option over Mystic Bronze, which is the other color choice.

Samsung offers other blue laptops, including the Galaxy Book Flex, which also stands out as a unique ultraportable laptop. I wish more manufacturers would buck the Space Gray trend and go for blue. 

All told, the 15-inch Galaxy Book Pro 360 measures 0.47 by 13.97 by 8.98 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.06 pounds. As mentioned, this is unquestionably thin and light for a 15-inch convertible laptop. The Spectre x360 15 measures 0.79 by 14.2 by 8.9 inches and weighs 4.23 pounds, while the 15-inch Lenovo Yoga 9i is 0.78 by 14 by 9.4 inches (HWD) and 4.4 pounds.

However, the ultra-thin Galaxy Book Pro 360 enclosure does limit the room available for a powerful cooling system, which in turn limits which CPU and graphics options Samsung is able to offer. Both the HP and the Lenovo are available with H-series Intel Core processors and discrete GPUs normally found on gaming and content-creation laptops, while the Galaxy Book Pro only offers lower-powered chips. We'll take a look at performance below.

Part of creating a slim, sleek laptop means giving up bulky input/output ports like full-size HDMI outputs and Ethernet jacks. The Galaxy Book Pro 360 doesn’t have those, but it does have a generous complement of three USB-C ports. One supports Thunderbolt 4, but any of them can be used to charge the laptop or connect external displays via an adapter or a special cable. There’s also a microSD card reader and a headphone jack. 

Standard wireless capabilities includes Wi-Fi 6E (Gig+), a cutting-edge networking feature that could reduce connectivity issues in the future, although few routers or other devices support the standard yet. There's also Bluetooth 5.1 for connecting wireless peripherals. Samsung does not currently offer LTE or 5G modems on the 15-inch Galaxy Book Pro, although the company said that it would introduce 5G as an option later this year.

The Galaxy Book Pro 360 comes with a one-year warranty, standard for its class, although Samsung offers plenty of additional support options. Samsung Care+ is available for two additional years ($250) or three additional years ($350), and adds accidental damage coverage (even for cracked screens) as well as the standard coverage for parts and labor.

Unique Software Security

The Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 comes with the new Samsung Security app, which has four unique features that could protect your privacy and thwart hacking, as well as mitigate physical theft.

I find the most useful to be the Privacy Folder. Using the app, you can designate any folder to be the Privacy Folder, as long as it’s not on the desktop or in the Windows system files. After the folder’s assigned, pressing the Windows key plus F11 will hide it from view. To show it again, use the same key combination, enter your Windows password, and the folder will reappear. 

Will this fool dedicated hackers? Probably not, since it works by changing the folder’s properties in the Windows File Explorer, which isn’t necessarily secure. Also, you unlock it with your Windows password, so anyone with that password can view your files.

Still, if your PC is frequently shared among others after you log into your account, and it contains moderately sensitive (but not top-secret) information, the Privacy Folder could be useful.

Component Check: Plenty of 'Tiger Lake' Power

As innovative and distinctive as most of the 15-inch Galaxy Book Pro 360 is, its component offerings are rather ordinary. There’s a Core i7-1165G7 processor from Intel’s latest 11th Generation “Tiger Lake” family. This is the go-to CPU for most of the premium ultraportable laptop set. The 15-inch Galaxy Book Pro also offers a generous 1TB SSD and 8GB or 16GB of memory. Our unit comes with the 16GB option; the 8GB option is $200 less.

Based on those specs, it ought to easily power through ordinary tasks such as web browsing or editing documents, and indeed I experienced no sluggishness or other issues over several days of testing. Still, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 lacks the extraordinary multi-threaded oomph of AMD’s latest fifth-generation Ryzen CPUs, Intel's H-series processors available in some competing 2-in-1s, or the fanless, silent, but still powerful Apple M1 processor. Samsung is rumored to be designing its own in-house processors similar to the M1, but if that’s the case, they’re not ready yet. 

The Galaxy Book Pro 360’s keyboard is also nothing to type home about. It’s nice to have a dedicated number pad on the 15-inch version, even if the keys are narrower than the main part of the keyboard. But all of the keys have the same 1mm of vertical travel distance. That’s shallow and makes for a less-than-comfortable typing experience, though with such a slim chassis, Samsung’s engineers may not have had room to increase the distance and comfort.

There's a fingerprint reader mounted in the upper right corner of the keyboard, which enables password-free logins to your Windows 10 account. The Galaxy Book Pro 360 does not support Windows Hello face recognition, so the fingerprint reader is your only option to avoid typing a password.

Camera and audio quality are merely average, with occasionally noisy video quality and rather tinny speakers. With a 720p camera and two-watt stereo speakers, you shouldn't expect crystal-clear video conferencing or robust audio anyway. This isn't necessarily a deficiency in a super-slim 15-inch convertible notebook, but since Samsung markets the Galaxy Book Pro 360 as "more like a phone" than a laptop, it's worth noting that you won't get anywhere near the incredible camera quality of a Galaxy smartphone.

Testing the Galaxy Book Pro 360: Down-to-Earth Everyday Performance

To evaluate the Galaxy Book Pro's computing performance, I compared its results on our benchmark tests with those of a handful of other 15-inch laptops in its price range. In addition to the Spectre x360 15 and the Yoga 9i, I'm also adding in the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1 Black Edition and the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 4. The Surface Laptop isn't a 2-in-1, but it is comparably priced and has the same screen size options as the Galaxy Book Pro 360, so many buyers will likely consider it as an alternative.

Our first test is PCMark. PCMark 10 and 8 are holistic performance suites developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). The PCMark 10 test we run simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better. (See more about how we test laptops.)

Any result above 4,000 on this test represents competent everyday performance, and neither the Galaxy Book Pro 360 nor any of its competitors disappoint here.

PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the PC's boot drive. This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better. Laptops with speedy SSDs all tend to perform very well on this test, and the Galaxy Book Pro 360 is no different.

Next is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive, multi-threaded workloads.

Heavy workloads like this are where the AMD Ryzen processor in the Surface Laptop 4 makes a difference. The H-series Core i7 processors in the Lenovo and HP are also better than what the Galaxy Book Pro 360 can manage, but the difference is smaller.

Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that's highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video (the open source Blender demo movie Tears of Steel) to a 1080p MP4 file. It’s a timed test, and lower results are better.

Again, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 lags behind the Microsoft, HP, and Lenovo laptops here. This is not to say that it can't render video in a pinch, but rather that it's not as well suited for the job.

We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here. The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.

Interestingly, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 actually turned in the best result on the Photoshop test. It's a reminder that if you're performing complex computing tasks that aren't heavily influenced by the number of CPU cores and threads, a thin and light laptop might perform just as well as a beefier one with a more powerful CPU and cooling system.

Excellent Battery Life

The Galaxy Book Pro 360 is not a gaming laptop, as the results of our 3DMark and Superposition gaming simulations demonstrate. It can handle basic graphics output just fine, but it's likely to balk at running intensive AAA titles with high detail settings. This is almost entirely due to its lack of a discrete graphics processor; any laptop with a discrete GPU is likely to perform better, as is the case with the Yoga and Spectre x360. Both of these are equipped with entry-level, but gaming-grade, GeForce GTX GPUs from Nvidia.

The Galaxy Book Pro 360's battery life, however, is excellent. Lasting for more than 18 hours on our video rundown test, it should easily get you through a full day of work.

With the Galaxy Book Pro 360, Samsung set out to make a 2-in-1 convertible that's more like a phone than a laptop. It's unquestionably sleek, thin, and light for a 15-inch 2-in-1. In fact, when it comes to physical dimensions, it trounces its competitors in this category, including the Spectre x360 and Yoga 9i, both of which are nearly a pound heavier and much thicker. It also lasts far longer away from a power outlet, something that is likely to appeal to both frequent travelers and those working or distance-learning from their backyards.

But by shedding weight, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 also gives up some of the qualities that make a laptop that's not like a phone attractive to many buyers. Most important, there's no option for a competent discrete graphics chip, or more powerful processors from AMD's Ryzen family and Intel's Core H-Series. Not only does the Editors' Choice-winning HP Spectre x360 15 offer an H-Series processor and discrete graphics as optional extras, but it also supports stylus input and has a 4K AMOLED screen.

So the Spectre is likely to be a better choice if you care about screen quality and performance. If instead a sleek, long-lasting, and extraordinarily thin and light 2-in1 is more your style, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 could be the better pick, and is a strong effort in its own right.

Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 (15-Inch)

Pros

• Remarkably thin and light

• Vivid Super AMOLED screen

• Dedicated number pad

• Distinctive Mystic Navy color option

• Unique software privacy and security features

Cons

• No 4K screen option

• Uncomfortable keyboard

The Bottom Line

With a Super AMOLED touch screen, a 360-degree hinge, an 11th Generation Intel Core i7 processor, and unique software features, the Galaxy Book Pro 360 is the sleekest 15-inch 2-in-1 convertible notebook out there.

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