Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 review: luxuriously slim

Samsung’s Galaxy Book range epitomises luxury, and the laptops in the lineup feature stupendously sleek designs and gorgeous AMOLED displays. I recently took the company’s Galaxy Book4 Pro (review) for a spin and was smitten with its Dynamic AMOLED touchscreen. That said, I was curious about a 2-in-1 option that would allow creators to maximise the display by flipping the screen completely. This brings us to the company’s latest addition – the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, which has been by my side for a hot minute. Here’s everything you should know before you add it to your cart. 

Design and I/O

The design of the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 is a facsimile of the Galaxy Book4 Pro I reviewed a while ago. Some subtle refinements add to the design’s allure, but to the untrained eye, both laptops will appear similar. To that end, the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 also features a sleek, all-metal build. It is a tad thicker, at 12.8mm, and weighs a bit more, too, at 1.6kg.

I’m all for the slight increase in the laptop’s girth, as it makes the frame feel stronger. One of my main gripes with the Galaxy Book4 Pro was that it felt too dainty. The Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, on the other hand, feels much sturdier, and its frame doesn’t creak when I grip the edges. The laptop’s screen now sits on a fully articulating 360-degree hinge, too. The hinge reduces screen wobble and makes the display more touch-friendly, which is excellent. It’s also less of an eye-sore than the one on the Galaxy Book4 Pro. 

The laptop is available in an elegant Moonstone Gray finish. The matte finish keeps fingerprints and smudges at bay. Additionally, the Samsung logo etched on the light exhibits different colours when light shines on it. Pool everything together, and the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 gets top marks in the design department. 

The laptop also comes with a good selection of ports, including two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB 3.2 Type-A connector, an HDMI 2.1 slot, and a microSD card reader. While I would’ve liked to see one more USB Type-A connector, most users will be able to connect a handful of accessories to the device seamlessly. Buyers will also get an S-pen with the device. The S-pen features a soft nib and won’t scratch the screen. 

In addition, it comes with a button that can be double-pressed to access the Air command tab. I’ll talk more about it later, so for now, let’s shift our focus to the laptop’s keyboard deck. On that note, the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 features the same keyboard deck as the one on the Galaxy Book4 Pro. The keyboard has well-spaced keys with excellent tactile feedback. The key travel is a bit shallow, but I still enjoyed typing lengthy articles on the device. 

The laptop also gets a Numpad, which should come in handy if you frequent apps like Excel or Calculator. The trackpad commands a sizeable area under the keyboard deck and offers a smooth tracking surface, too. However, it is not as customisable as the one on devices like the HP Spectre x360, which features a haptic trackpad with additional gestures for changing brightness, touch intensity, and volume.

The same goes for the webcam, which offers good picture output and supports Windows Studio effects like portrait blur and automatic framing. That said, it doesn’t come with any added privacy features, including those available with HP’s Spectre range, like waking the display automatically when a user approaches the device. Additionally, the laptop lacks an IR sensor for Windows Hello face recognition. However, it comes with a fingerprint sensor embedded within the power button, which worked flawlessly during my testing.

Display and Audio

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 range features one of the nicest displays on the market. My review unit, in particular, gets a 16-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X screen with a 2.8K resolution. The screen refreshes at up to 120Hz and covers 120 percent of the DCI-P3 colour space. It goes without saying that the laptop is a godsend for media buffs. The screen delivers inky blacks and adds a splash of vibrancy to the colours.

The display offers wide viewing angles and can get remarkably bright at 500 nits too. I spent a lot of time watching movies and playing games like Hades and Hollow Knight on the device, which greatly benefited from the screen’s OLED technology. The visuals simply popped, and I found it hard to take my eyes off the screen. There is some room for improvement, though, and Samsung should work on reducing the size of the bezel directly under the display for the next iteration. 

As for audio, the laptop comes with a quad-speaker array, which can get quite loud. The acoustics offer good depth, too, and don’t distort at high volume levels. Interestingly, I wasn’t too happy with the downward-firing speakers on the Galaxy Book4 Pro. However, on the Book4 Pro 360, I could flip the base up, ensuring the audio output didn’t get muffled. 

Software

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 comes with a bunch of utilities that can enhance your productivity. The Air command tab, for instance, is the home to some nifty S-pen shortcuts, including Smart Select and Screen Write. The former is a handy alternative to the snipping tool, and it allows users to take screenshots and even make GIFs in the blink of an eye. The latter lets users jot down notes on a screen grab. 

Both features are quite useful, and I can see the Screen Write feature reducing the time it takes to communicate changes or fixes with team members. This is especially true in the creative space, and the Screen Write feature can be used to say, highlight the issues in a thumbnail. This would reduce the back and forth and clearly highlight the problem areas to editors. In addition, users can also drag and drop shortcuts for their most-used apps in the Air command tab. While this isn’t an inherently quicker way to launch an app, it can help declutter your taskbar.

The laptop also comes with a bunch of live wallpapers that can be accessed from the Galaxy Book Experience app. In addition, creatives can use the bundled Samsung Studio photo and video editing app. It’s not going to rival Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, but it can help you edit reels or other short-form videos quickly. The app comes with a straightforward user interface and lets users club multiple short clips, stickers, music, audio, and more to a project. 

Performance and Battery Life

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 is backed by Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H processor. The laptop gets Intel’s Arc graphics with eight Xe cores and 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM. Unsurprisingly, the unit performs similarly to other premium thin-and-lights and convertibles like the HP Spectre x360 and the Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 Pro. 

Take the laptops’ Cinebench R24 single and multi-core scores, for instance. The Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 scored 520 and 99 points, while the HP Spectre x360 and the Galaxy Book4 Pro scored 830 and 101 points and 620 and 100 points, respectively. 

The scenery remains unchanged in Fire Strike and Night Raid synthetic tests, which stress a laptop’s CPU and GPU. Here, the Spectre x360 led the pack and scored 4,437 and 28,659 points. The Galaxy Book4 Pro and the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, on the other hand, net 3,991 and 24,916 points and 3,586 and 20,388 points, respectively. Despite using the same CPU and iGPUs, the Spectre x360 fared slightly better, which can be attributed to the laptop’s roomier chassis, which dissipates heat better.

Benchmarks aside, the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360’s real-world performance was in line with my expectations. The laptop was quick to open apps and could juggle between a handful of applications like Slack, Asana, Google Chrome, and AirTable. I could comfortably multitask between apps using split screen and browse data-laden Excel sheets as well. I did run into the occasional stutter while working on multiple CMS systems in Chrome. Other than that, I didn’t notice any major performance issues on the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360. 

Since we’re on the subject, let’s also look at the laptop’s gaming performance. Granted, the device is not geared toward gamers, but its Arc GPU is capable of running casual games and some eSports titles. Hades, for instance, logs around 100FPS at 2.8K resolution. Other indie games like Hollow Knight are also playable and run at 100FPS at the display’s native resolution. That said, more demanding games like GTA 5 are best played at a lower resolution.

To give you a better picture, at 2.8K resolution and High settings, the game averages around 25FPS. However, dropping the resolution to 1200P will let you enjoy the game at around 50FPS. Similarly, Valorant runs at around 60FPS at 2.8K resolution and overturns around 90FPS at 1200P resolution.

While that’s great, the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 could use a better cooling system. The laptop’s base can get quite warm to the touch, and I wouldn’t recommend using the laptop on your lap. Most of the laptop’s P-cores hover around 90 degrees under load, with some touching 99 degrees as well. On the bright side, the laptop offers a fantastic battery backup, and I can use it for around six hours (Balanced battery preset) at a stretch. The 65W travel adapter is quite compact, too, which is great.

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 costs Rs 1.8 lakh, although can be snagged for around 1.6 lakh at the time of writing this review. For its discounted price, the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 is an excellent machine that sports a sleek and elegant design. The laptop’s display offers an unmatched media consumption experience, and while its performance is not as impressive as that of the HP Spectre x360, it shouldn’t get bogged down by standard office workloads.

If you’re looking for a lightweight convertible with a premium design, the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 will cater to your every need. 

Editor’s Rating: 7.5 / 10

Pros:

• S-pen features enhance productivity
• Gorgeous 2.8K display
• Extremely sleek and portable
• Loud quad-speaker array

Cons:

• Can get hot under load
• Performance not as good as rivals