- Samsung has a ton of Galaxy Books in its lineup.
And you've probably heard of some of them.
There's the Galaxy Book S,
the Galaxy Book Flex,
the Galaxy Book Ion.
And we've just gotten a look
at two brand new Galaxy Books.
The Galaxy Book Pro and the Galaxy Book Pro 360.
The Galaxy Book Pro is a standard clamshell laptop.
And the Galaxy Book Pro 360 is a convertible
which supports Samsung's S pen.
(keyboard clicking)
Both of these devices come in 13.3 and 15.6 inch sizes.
And right off the bat, the thing to know about these,
is that they're unbelievably light.
The 13-inch Galaxy Book Pro starts at just 1.92 pounds.
That means it's going to be one of the lightest laptops
you could buy of any size anywhere.
The larger Galaxy Book Pro is 2.3 pounds.
And that's still crazy light for a 15-incher.
The other exciting things about these devices
are their screens.
Now, the Book Pro has an AMOLED screen
and the Book Pro 360 has what Samsung's calling,
a super AMOLED screen.
Which is a touch screen that Samsung says is brighter
and less power hungry than a traditional OLED.
So most screens that you'll see on laptops are LCD panels,
which means the whole panel is illuminated
by one LED backlight.
So what makes OLED panels so phenomenal,
is that every pixel provides its own illumination.
So that means OLED panels can usually provide blacker blacks
and better contrast ratios
than any other laptop screen that you'll see.
Though they also tend not to be quite as bright.
These Galaxy Books will be among very very few
13-inch laptops that offer this OLED technology.
So the screens were both pretty glossy
and did kick back some glare.
But I did find that I could actually see the videos
and webpages that I was using while I worked outside.
And that's not the case with a lot of laptops out there.
The other major update here is that there's a new S pen
which comes with the Book Pro 360.
The only difference between this S pen
and the S pen on the Galaxy Book Flex,
is that this one is 2.5 times thicker.
Samsung says this is to prevent hand cramping.
And I can't tell you how effective that's gonna be,
but I will say, it feels like a real pen in your hand.
Now the new S pen is not supported by the regular Book Pro
because that one doesn't have a touch screen.
On the inside, all four of these devices
contain Intel's newest 11th gen core processors.
Samsung worked with Intel to certify all of these devices
through Intel's Evo program.
Which means that Intel vouches
that a new laptop meets various standards
that are most important to users.
So that includes all-day battery life,
quick boot time, general responsiveness, et cetera.
So we've tried a number of these Evo devices for ourselves
over the past year,
and not all of them have quite measured up
to all of those benchmarks in our testing,
but the Evo label is a promising sign.
And I'm looking forward to seeing
whether these Galaxy Books actually hold up in our testing.
I took a couple of these models for a spin
and they seemed pretty responsive.
I was able to run a couple of videos at a time
without significant issues.
Now, one thing to note is that you can't configure
the Galaxy Book Pro with a discrete GPU.
All the models come with Intel's Iris Xe
integrated graphics.
Now, don't get me wrong,
these integrated graphics are good.
We've tried them in a number of different laptops
over the past year
and they can generally run whatever games
you would want to play at pretty good frame rates,
provided that you bump the settings down.
But they're not what you'd buy
for professional video work for example.
So that doesn't make the Book Pro a bad laptop,
but it does mean that the Pro name is a bit misleading.
It's not targeting high power users,
so much as amateur graphic artists
and other average Joes who just want a really nice screen.
Another upgrade here is that these Galaxy Books
include Dolby Atmos speakers,
which are engineered by AKG.
The benefit of Dolby Atmos
is that it's supposed to give you more of a 3D
surround sound experience.
So that will be a nice compliment to the AMOLED screen
if you're watching movies.
During my brief testing period,
I didn't get to listen to any audio
that actually support Dolby Atmos.
But I did get a pretty full sound
from the YouTube videos that I watched.
The Galaxy Book Pro can come with a CORE i5 or a CORE i7.
You can go up to eight gigabytes of RAM on the 13,
and 16 gigs on the 15.
These both go up to 512 gigabytes of storage.
And that's an NVMe SSD.
You have one Thunderbolt 4, one USB type C, one USB 3.2,
an audio jack, and a micro SD slot.
And then the 15 inch also has an HDMI.
And both of these have a fingerprint sensor.
Now, the Pro 360 is a bit more pro
than the regular Book Pro in a couple ways.
So it has the same processor options,
a CORE i5 and a CORE i7,
but both the 13-inch and 15-inch 360 model
comes with up to 16 gigs of RAM.
The 13-inch comes with up to 512 gigs of storage.
And the 15 goes all the way up to a terabyte.
The 13-incher also supports 5G,
though your mileage with that will vary
based on where you are.
Both models have one Thunderbolt 4, two USB type C,
an audio jack, and a micro SD.
These have a fingerprint sensor as well.
The Galaxy Book Pro 13 starts at 999
and the Pro 15 starts at 1099.
The 360 models start at 1199 and 1299 respectively.
You'll be able to pre-order both the Galaxy Book Pro
and the Galaxy Book Pro 360 today, April 28th,
and they'll ship on May 14th.
So both of these models are lightweight
ultra portable laptops with good screens,
and they're coming from a company that's very good
at making lightweight ultra portable laptops
with good screens.
So far so good.
But the question is gonna be,
how well these laptops execute on the other fundamentals.
Like battery life, performance, and audio quality.
After all, for consumer laptops at the $1,000 price point,
you want the standout feature to be a bonus,
not something you have to sacrifice other things to get
(keyboard clicks)