- We have just been hanging out
with Samsung and they have a whole bunch
of new additions to their Galaxy Book Laptop line.
So there's a new Galaxy Book 3 Pro.
There's a Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, but the most
exciting one is called the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra.
(light music)
I've reviewed a number of Samsung Galaxy Books
over the past few years and generally, the deal
with these devices is they're really thin,
they're really light and they have really excellent screens
but that's kind of all there is about them.
Those are sort of the special traits.
This laptop, the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra is more
of a competitor to Apple's 16 inch MacBook Pro
and it's targeting that same sort of audience,
the creator audience, maybe some gaming,
people who really want high power processors
and high power GPUs.
So let's get into the specs.
This device runs Windows 11.
It has a 13th Gen Intel Core i7 or Core i9 for graphics.
You get an Nvidia GForce RTX 4050 or a GForce RTX 4070.
It supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1.
You can have 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes of memory
and that's LPDDR5.
You can get 512 gigabytes or one terabyte
of storage and that's PCIe.
The camera is FHD 1080p.
The battery size is 76 watt hours
and the adapter is a 100 watt USBC.
In terms of ports, there are two Thunderbolt four ports.
There's one USB type A, there's an HBMI 2.0,
there's a micro SD and thankfully there's a headphone jack.
This is a 16 inch 2880
by 1,800, 16 by 10, 120 Hertz, AMOLED display.
And I know that's a mouthful, but it looks really good.
So we were using it in a pretty bright space.
There was a lot of glare that can sometimes happen
with glossy panels, but it looked really nice.
The colors were really bright
and as we watched some YouTube videos,
I really got a sense that I was looking
at a high quality panel.
Using this doesn't actually feel that different
to using other Galaxy Books.
It's really thin, it's really light,
it's really sturdy and the keyboard is really comfortable.
It has a very nice click.
It's a little bit shallow, but I honestly don't care
that much 'cause it sounds so cool when I'm typing on it.
Honestly, the only real issue I had with the chassis
in the short testing period was the touch pad.
It was a little bit thin
and it seemed like it wasn't always picking up
every gesture that I wanted it to.
Sometimes it was failing to pick up my two finger clicks
and it thought they were one finger clicks.
Sometimes it wasn't picking up my scrolling
and my fingers were skidding a little bit
and every so often I was like, clicking
and the click just didn't register.
I hope it's fixed by the final release.
These were pre-production units, so you always hope
that those kinds of flaws will be fixed in the coming weeks.
Now one of the cool things about the laptop that will appeal
to Samsung fans in particular is that it's really
plugged into the overall Samsung ecosystem.
So if you have a Samsung tablet or a Samsung phone,
there are various ways that these two work together nicely.
For example, there's this second screen feature,
where you can really easily use a Samsung tablet
as a secondary monitor next to your Samsung laptop.
Another cool thing is called Quick Share.
So this allows you to really quickly share files
between a Samsung laptop
and a Samsung tablet or a Samsung phone.
And this is across the Galaxy Book line.
One other cool thing is this Studio Mode feature.
So this has a number of webcam features that you
can use to make yourself look nicer on Google Meet
or Zoom or whatever camera app you're working with.
So there's auto framing and that worked really well.
It like, follows you around like Apple Center Stage
as you move your head around your area/
There's this background blur which blurs your background,
as you would expect.
There's supposed to be this eye contact feature
that makes your eyes look like they're looking
at the camera, even when you're looking
all over the place.
We couldn't get that to work here, but you know,
like I said, these are pre-production units we're testing.
So hopefully, those issues will be resolved
by the final release and Samsung assured us
that they would be.
I will say a core i7, 13,700 H
plus an RTX 4050 GPU in a chassis this thin and light,
that's ambitious.
And that's not to mention the higher spec models,
which are supposed to include a core i9
and an RTX 4070,
which are even more powerful and power hungry chips.
I'm a little worried about the cooling.
It's not impossible for a chassis this thin
to cool chips that powerful, but it is ambitious
and that's before we even talk about battery life
because this thing, as we said before, has a very
high resolution OLED screen.
When laptops that are thin
and light have tried putting super powerful chips
and discreet GPUs and high resolution OLED screens together
in the past few years, it hasn't often gone super well.
For example, the Dell XPS 15.
So I'm really curious
whether this is a device will actually even be able to hold
up to the battery life
and the efficiency that Apple can provide.
If this laptop is anything other
than a giant fireball that dies after five hours,
that will be a huge achievement for Samsung and frankly,
I really hope they can pull it off.
Those were my first impressions
from 45-ish minutes using the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra.
Should this thing cost $2,300?
Would you buy it over a MacBook Pro 16?
Do we expect this thing to have any battery life at all?
Let me know in the comments.
I hope I can answer some of these questions
in my full review, where we'll have benchmarks,
we'll have more extended impressions
and we will hopefully have a lot of fun.