Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Review: A Gorgeous 16" OLED Laptop
Samsung's Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Delivers A Premium Thin-And-Light Convertible With Excellent Build Quality And A Killer OLED Display
| Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 - Starting MSRP $1,899, Currently On Sale For $1,499 The 16-inch Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 is powered by Intel's latest Meteor Lake platform, features a giant trackpad, a beautiful AMOLED display, a 360 degree display hinge and fantastic battery life. |
|||
|
 |
||
Equipped with one of Intel's latest Meteor Lake processors, a beautiful 16-inch AMOLED display with great color depth, a giant trackpad, and a bodacious battery, Samsung's Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 specs set a new standard for the modern thin and light, but larger format laptop. This isn't the kind of laptop you'd get for its raw horsepower, but rather for what should be exceptional great battery life, cool and quiet operation, and an overall premium user experience. That's not to say that the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 won't have some highlights when it comes to performance, as it features an AI-accelerating neural processing unit (NPU) and Intel's latest integrated Arc graphics, which makes this thin and light capable for light duty gaming and burgeoning AI workloads and generative AI apps like Stable Diffusion.
That said, while the new Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360's specs and features certainly look compelling, we're here to deliver a full shakedown of the machine. So, let's start with a few more specifics, then we'll look at design and build quality, and we'll finish-up with performance characteristics from all angles to see how this new 16-inch premium machine measures up.
Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Specifications
The Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 is currently offered in only one configuration, which includes Intel's Core Ultra 7 155H with a 4.8GHz boost clock for its six P-cores, a max frequency of 3.8GHz for its eight regular E-cores, and two low-power E-cores clocked up to 2.5GHz. The Core Ultra 7 155H in the machine is paired with 16GB of LPDDR5-7467 memory, which unfortunately is not upgradeable. Samsung doesn't put a discrete GPU into this laptop either, but since the 155H is equipped with an integrated, eight-core Arc GPU that's supported by fast RAM, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
For storage, the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 comes with a mainstream 1TB, PCIe 3.0 SSD. We're not entirely sure if this drive can be upgraded, though this was possible on past Galaxy Books. What's certainly not upgradeable is the 76Whr battery, not that you'd really want to considering how large it is, relatively speaking. While that's not quite the 100Whr battery on the MacBook Pro 16 or the 99.9Whr battery of the MSI Prestige AI Evo, it's still respectable given the thinness of this machine. With a resolution of 2,880 by 1,800 pixels, the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360's AMOLED display is crispy, and thanks to a 120Hz refresh rate animations are nice and smooth as well.
Thin, Light, and Convertible - Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Design & Build Quality
The chassis of the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 is made exclusively of anodized aluminum and adorned in Samsung's "Moonstone Gray" color. On the outside, it's pretty plain other than the small off-center Samsung logo on the top lid, and features on the bottom like the rubber feet, speakers, and ventilation. On the inside it's pretty standard too, with the keyboard and the glass-topped touchpad, though the screen is notably rounded instead of having sharp corners like most displays. This isn't all unlike a certain laptop from a popular brand, and you could probably mistake the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 for a MacBook Pro 16 if you aren't looking too hard.
But once you get past the looks, you can tell this is a very different machine. The biggest difference is certainly the display, which has touch functionality and a 360-degree hinge, so the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 can convert into a tablet. In terms of fidelity, the screen has resolution of 2880 by 1800 pixels with 120% coverage for the DCI P3 color space. The screen also supports a dynamic 120Hz refresh rate, though by default we found that it was set to just 60Hz.
Samsung's S Pen will also work with the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360's display. Samsung recommends the S Pen for creative types and articles. The S Pen works pretty much like any other stylus for touch screen Windows laptops, but has a button on it to pull up a menu for some Samsung apps, for drawing and for note taking, etc. Using the S Pen, it felt nice in the hand, pressing it against the screen felt natural and responsive, and overall it worked very well.
The keyboard and trackpad also stand out in the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360. Samsung was actually able to fit a nearly full sized keyboard, including not just arrow keys, and function keys, but also a 10-key numpad as well. On the function key row, you'll find the standard screen brightness, sound, and keyboard backlight buttons, but also a button that changes the performance profile of the laptop on the fly (we'll get to those profiles in a moment). The keyboard was nice to type on, and it wasn't hard to get up to speed on it. One particularly nice but subtle touch to the keyboard is that the backlight will turn off if the laptop hasn't been used for a few moments, saving battery life, though this can be disabled if the user chooses to do so.
There's also a fingerprint scanner at the top right of the keyboard, which also acts as the power button. But consequently, the 1080p webcam doesn't offer Windows Hello support, which is a little disappointing but not unexpected; usually you don't get both a fingerprint scanner and an IR webcam with Windows Hello. Additionally, there's no privacy shutter for the webcam, but Samsung does offer an in-software way to disable the webcam.
As for the trackpad, it's massive. It's as wide as the spacebar plus three keys, and just as tall as the entire keyboard. The normal Windows trackpad gestures work on the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, and there's plenty of room to perform them. It's highly unlikely you'll ever find yourself wanting for a bigger trackpad.
The I/O options on the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 are fairly limited, as is the case on many thin and light devices these days. On the left you'll find an HDMI 2.1a port and two Thunderbolt 4 ports, both with power delivery and support for the included USB Type-C charger. On the right is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, a MicroSD card slot, and an audio jack. Another USB port for the right side would have been nice. Technically, you could plug three external displays into the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, but since one Thunderbolt 4 port should be left open for charging, the likely max is two, unless you have a hub that has passthrough charging.
The only quirks regarding the build quality of the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 were on the bottom of the chassis, and in all fairness this is a minor complaint. But for whatever reason, the rubber feet on this laptop were dust magnets. Even after just two or three weeks of somewhat daily use, the feet were covered in a surprising amount of dust. This is a minor quibble, but the feet just seemed to gather more dust than we've seen on other system. The feet did do a pretty good job of keeping the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 firmly in place, though.
Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Software Controls
In an effort to offer a software experience with unique features to enable this device, Samsung includes lots of apps out of the box. By our count, there were about three dozen different apps or applets Samsung installed for various purposes, which are all centralized into the Galaxy Book Experience app. While these apps do generally bring additional functionality to the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, some aren't as useful, unless you have a Samsung Galaxy phone to pair with the laptop. In addition, it's unlikely you'll find the Samsung Gallery app all that useful when you can just use Windows File Explorer.
Of all the apps Samsung installs, the most useful ones were probably Samsung Settings and Samsung Update. While Windows has its own settings menu, Samsung's has some extra features that were useful, like being able to adjust the keyboard backlight settings, power and battery options (for example, limiting the maximum charge to 80% for better battery endurance), and disabling the webcam. Samsung Update was able to wrangle all the individual apps, drivers, and other pieces of software and provide updates when needed, which can often be pretty annoying in Windows, especially for devices this complex on the software side of things.
Speaking of power settings, these govern the Core Ultra 7's frequencies and power consumption, as well as the speed of the fan on the machine's cooling system. There are four different, self-explanatory modes: High Performance, Optimized (which is what the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 uses by default), Quiet, and Silent. These are intended to be used in place of the regular power profiles Windows uses, and are a nice touch for users wanting even more control over the performance, power and thermal profile this laptop.
And with that, let's put this machine to the test in the benchmarks, next...
