REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Samsung defies the laws of physics with its new super-thin, super super-light AMOLED laptop
Samsung Galaxy Book Pro
Safe to say that Samsung is back in the laptop game. It withdrew from Europe in an enviably smooth manner back in 2014, but even at the time said it may not be forever. True to its word, the South Korean mega-company decided to test the appetite for its laptops in Britain and beyond with the sub-1kg Galaxy Book, but with the Galaxy Book Pro it’s going for the big time. This new brand – to us Brits, at least – is available in both 13in and 15in variants, and we test the larger model this time around. Suffice it to say that we like what we see. Read our full, indepth review on p50.
PRICE Core i7, £1,208 (£1,449 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com S ince returning to the UK laptop market in 2020 after an absence of six years, Samsung has had hit after hit. We are particular fans of its tiny Galaxy Book S ( see issue 319,
p87), a 13.3in laptop with integrated 4G that weighs less than 1kg. The new Galaxy Book Pro is further evidence that Samsung knows what it’s doing.
The Galaxy Book Pro name covers far more than the 15.6in model we review this month. It’s a full range of 13.3in and 15.6in laptops, available in both conventional and 360° “convertible” forms, and all with Intel’s Evo certification to guarantee long battery life, slim dimensions and
g y instant-on speed. The Galaxy Book Pro is undoubtedly the most exciting new laptop range we’ve seen in 2021.
Introducing the range
That’s the overview: now come the details. Several key components are shared across all the models, most notably their AMOLED displays and Intel’s 11th-generation Core processors. With one exception, they all include 512GB SSDs as well.
We print a summary table opposite, but it’s worth flagging Samsung’s aggressive pricing. Normally such sleek design, premium panels and Intel chips result in a healthy premium, but prices start surprisingly low: the most basic 13.3in model costs £1,099 for an Intel Core i5-1135G7 and 8GB of RAM, while the 15.6in version with the same specification is £1,199.
As our table reveals, upgrading to a Core i7-1165G7 processor and 16GB of RAM adds a sizeable amount to the price, but at £1,449 for the 15.6in model it’s the same price as its most obvious rival: the LG
Gram 16 ( see issue 320, p50).
With an identical core spec, this costs £1,449 from currys.co.uk.
Model weight
The weight is the first thing you notice about the Galaxy Book Pro. It’s incredibly light: 1.05kg is nothing for a 15.6in notebook. It’s even lighter than the 16in LG Gram, which weighs an already featherweight 1.16kg.
I’ve no idea how Samsung has managed this. After all, it’s hardly unique in deploying an aluminium alloy chassis to keep weight down and rigidity up. Maybe the battery and some of the other heavy components are in a parallel dimension and so don’t register on the scales.
Either way, it’s the lightest bigscreen laptop on the market and, considering how slim and compact it is – it measures 355 x 226 x 13.3mm –
“Normally such sleek design, premium panels and Intel chips result in a healthy premium, but prices start surprisingly low”
“I applaud Samsung’s decision to fit a USB-A 3.1 port, proving once and for all that other manufacturers omit them by choice”
it’s surprisingly stiff and solid as well. Yes, the lid has some flex to it, but no more than many other thin laptops. More importantly, the Galaxy Book Pro has been tested to the MIL-STD810G standard, so it will survive exposure to rain, sand, dust, high humidity and that all-important gunfire vibration.
You also might be forgiven for thinking that you can’t change the internal components. Not so. Remove the four rubber feet, undo the screws they conceal and unclip the bottom panel to add an M.2 2280 PCIe SSD. You can also swap the 512GB M.2 2230 SSD. Everything else is fixed in place.
I also applaud Samsung’s decision to fit a USB-A 3.1 port (5Gbits/sec), proving once and for all that other manufacturers omit them by choice rather than due to a genuine lack of space. It also squeezes in a full-sized HDMI port, two USB-C ports – one of which supports Thunderbolt 4 – a 3.5mm audio jack and a microSD card slot. That’s impressive for a machine this skinny.
Wireless connectivity is handled by an Intel AX210 card, which supports the latest 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E standard and Bluetooth 5.1.
Key pluses
With so little space to play with, it came as no surprise that the keyboard has a shallow action. On the plus side, it’s positive and quiet: I found it a pleasure to type on. The fingerprint scanner built into the power button works equally well. And Samsung also includes a three-level backlight, complete with an ambient sensor that can adjust the backlight brightness automatically.
Below the keyboard sits a large 130 x 90mm trackpad, and I can’t think of a bad thing to say about that, either. The finish, the action, the size and position are all nigh-on perfect.
If you’re invested in Samsung’s Galaxy mobile and home ecosystems, the Galaxy Book Pro has lots more to offer. For example, you can use the Galaxy Tab S7 and S7+ Android tablets as a second screen, control devices linked to a Samsung SmartThings account or share files between your
Galaxy phone and laptop using Samsung’s SmartShare.
All told, the Galaxy Book Pro has more than a dozen Samsung apps baked-in and fewer than half can be uninstalled. Whether or not you regard them as necessary or even useful – other than Samsung Settings, which I will come to shortly – will depend on your tolerance levels.
Sumptuous display
As soon as you lay eyes on the Galaxy Book Pro’s sumptuous AMOLED display, you know you’re looking at something out of the ordinary.
But let’s get some bad news out of the way. It’s only a 1,920 x 1,080 panel, so it lacks the sharpness you find on 15.6in laptops with 1440p screens. It isn’t the brightest panel you’ll ever see, either, with a peak of 308cd/m². You will struggle if you’re using it outdoors in bright sunlight, especially as the finish is glossy rather than matte. Lower brightness is a natural side effect of an AMOLED panel, though, and there are many benefits. Aside from the effectively perfect contrast ratio, and a commendable average Delta E of 1.39, it’s capable of covering 114% of the DCI-P3 space and 111% of Adobe RGB. Open the Samsung Settings app and you’ll even find the option to switch between colour profiles: Vivid (AMOLED native) for gaming, Natural (sRGB) for web browsing and general use, Photo editing (Adobe RGB) and Movie (DCI-P3). There’s also an Auto mode that changes the profile to match certain Samsung and Windows 10 applications. Alas, this last profile doesn’t support thirdparty apps so it doesn’t recognise the VLC media player as requiring DCI-P3 or that games look best in Vivid.
The one thing missing from the screen is touch, but that’s hardly essential on a non-2-in-1 laptop.
The audio output, although not in the same league as the screen, is another strength. Dolby Atmoscertified AKG speakers fire out of
two grilles in the base near the front corners and, despite the space limitations, they deliver plenty of volume, no distortion and even a decent amount of bass.
Powerful core
Samsung sent in the top-end version of its 15.6in Galaxy Book Pro, which is built around Intel’s quad-core 2.4GHz Core i7-1165G7 processor with integrated Xe graphics and 16GB of LPDDR4x (soldered) RAM.
The Samsung Settings app lets you tweak performance. You can set the fans to permanently off (No Fan), which is handy if you’re working in a library or other quiet environment. The Optimised mode is normal Windows, and then there’s Silent. This mode doesn’t disable the fan but uses the microphone to adjust the fan speed in accordance with ambient noise.
Leave the Galaxy Book Pro in Optimised mode and the fan does fire up quite often but, at middling speed, it’s not intrusively loud. Only once did the fan start to run at what I took to be top speed, when a BIOS update was being installed.
Lastly, there’s High Performance mode, which allows the fans to run free and throws any thermal throttling protocols out of the window. We conducted our tests in High-Performance mode and our battery rundown test in Optimised mode.
Despite this supposed advantage, it performs much like every other system that uses the same underpinnings. A score of 126 in the PC Pro benchmark was identical to the
Huawei MateBook X
Pro ( see issue 321, p54), and fractionally higher than the 118 returned by the LG Gram
16. Both machines had the same core components.
Notably, however, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga
( see p54) was even faster.
The Galaxy Book Pro performed well in our gaming tests. Dirt: Showdown returned a score of 84fps at 720p and 59fps in Metro: Last Light at 1080p; both those figures are better than the Razer Book 13 ( see issue 322, p59), the previous Core i7 1165G7 with Xe graphics champ.
Battery life is more impressive than speed, with our video-rundown test draining the battery in 16hrs 28mins. That’s over four hours more than the LG Gram 16; the only laptop we’ve tested that has done better is the M1 Apple MacBook Pro ( see issue 316, p44), which reached 17hrs 31mins.
My final note on performance: the internal 512GB Samsung SSD turned in strong read and write speeds of 2,424MB/sec and 1,720MB/ sec respectively. The only reason you’ll need to replace the SSD is for storage space or if it dies, and note the warranty is for three years if you buy from johnlewis.com.
Big-screen bonanza
What’s not to like about the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro? It’s light, so slender it almost vanishes when looked at side-on, has a solid array of ports, a good keyboard, a massive trackpad, solid performance and chart-topping (almost) battery life. You can criticise the screen for its resolution, but 1,920 x 1,080 scales surprisingly well across this 15.6in panel and few will grumble in day-to-day use. But if that’s a worry then you should stick to the LG Gram 16 with its 2,560 x 1,600 IPS display.
I would rather Samsung’s marketing suits hadn’t insisted that you can only have a touchscreen on the 360 models and an LTE modem solely in the 13.3in machine, although considering how good the rest of the package is – and how reasonable the price – it seems churlish to complain.
Will the Galaxy Book Pro sell in the same volume as Samsung’s phones? Probably not; it’s a laptop, after all. However, it’s so good that it deserves to. It’s officially our favourite Windows laptop of 2021 so far. ALUN TAYLOR
SPECIFICATIONS
4-core 2.8GHz (4.7GHz burst) Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor Intel Iris Xe graphics 16GB LPDDR4X RAM 15.6in non-touch AMOLED display, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution 512GB NVMe SSD 2x2 Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.1 Thunderbolt 4 USB-C 3.1 USB-A 3.1 HDMI microSD slot 3.5mm combo jack 720p webcam 68Wh battery Windows 10 Home 355 x 226 x 13.3mm (WDH) 1.05kg 3yr RTB warranty (via John Lewis)