Mehul Ruben DasMar 13, 2023 20:24:41 IST:
When people think of laptops, they usually limit their imaginations to offerings from HP, Dell, and in some cases Lenovo or IBM ThinkPad. This is mainly because India Inc. has for some reason chosen to equip their employees with these brands of laptops. As a result, many other laptop manufacturers are being overlooked.
Not many people know this, but Samsung has a pretty solid line of premium laptops, the Galaxy Book series. This year, they launched the third version of their premium notebooks called the Galaxy Book3 series.
These new laptops are thin and light devices designed to meet the demands of a wider audience. The new Galaxy Book3 series fits as easily into the boardroom as into the life of a content creator who’s always on the go.
Got our hands on the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 and as far as first impressions go, boy were we surprised.
The display
The first thing you notice when you open and turn on the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 is the screen. We have a 16-inch 120 Hz 3K display with a resolution of 2880×1800. The display is really something special, especially for a laptop. There were times when the screen felt a little better than what we get on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, other times it felt pretty much on par. Yes, the glasses suggest that Apple’s display is of a higher resolution, but to be honest, we haven’t really been able to tell much of a difference in terms of resolution so far.
The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360’s screen is a touchscreen. We also get an S Pen bundled with the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360. As the name suggests, you can rotate the screen 360 degrees and place it on a table to hide the keyboard.
What really makes the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 stand out is the display’s color, dynamic range, and contrast ratio. The blacks of the panel are real blacks. sometimes it’s almost impossible to distinguish between the actual bezels (which are quite thin, by the way) and the panel. Viewing any kind of content on a laptop is just awesome.
Keyboard and Trackpad
The keyboard and trackpad are a few other aspects that stand out. The keyboard is full-sized and backlit, as you’d expect from any high-end hybrid laptop. Amazing typing experience. It really is a joy to type on the keyboard. The keys have decent travel, are quite firm and have well-calibrated actuation points, making typing on the laptop a truly satisfying experience.
The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360’s trackpad is huge, making it easy to scroll through pages and timelines, and despite its size, the trackpad is accurate with no dead zones.
The presentation
The performance we get from the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 is also on another level. The laptop is powered by an Intel i7-1360P processor that has 12 cores (4 Performance cores + 8 efficiency cores) and 16 threads. The notebook also comes with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM.
Opening apps and switching between them is easy. Additionally, it breezed through benchmarks and other productivity-related tasks in our initial testing. We think it will just blow through our Photoshop and Lightroom workloads.
Now you won’t be able to play your favorite AAA titles on the laptop as it comes with Intel’s Xe Graphics and no dedicated GPU. Having said that, we expect the laptop to handle such games Rocket League and: League of Legends just fine
Samsung specific features
We’ve just started testing many of the features you get when you join the Samsung ecosystem. We especially like how the laptop practically allows users to clone their Galaxy mobile phones to laptops without any hurdles.
You can also connect your Galaxy phone’s Internet connection to a laptop to work on the go. There’s also a 5G version of this PC if you want to boost mobile performance even more.
Another very nice software touch is Samsung’s partnership with Adobe. You can upload images from the Galaxy S23’s Expert RAW software directly to Lightroom for editing. Samsung will provide the service for free for six months.
There are also a number of other features that we’ll cover in our full review, so be sure to keep an eye out for that.