Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 review: Fourth time’s a charm

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro competes in what is one of the most demanding segments of the laptop market. Machines aimed at customers with a few quid to spare and who are looking for a slim, light, well-engineered premium laptop with decent battery life and a colour-accurate display.

Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro laptops have been amongst the most desirable thin and light and (in “360” form) convertible productivity laptops since the line launched back in the spring of 2021. Typically, the strength of these machines was in the high-quality Samsung-made AMOLED touchscreen displays and integration into Samsung’s “Galaxy” ecosystem.

For 2024, the range has received a revamp, including a move to the latest 14th generation Intel Meteor Lake chips with their new, more powerful Intel Arc GPUs, along with dedicated low-power cores to handle machine-learning tasks.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Review: What you need to know

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 comes with a raft of high-end features as standard, including a 3K AMOLED touchscreen, quad-speaker sound system, Thunderbolt 4 ports and an all-metal chassis and body.

Samsung also bundles one of its S Pen styluses in the box, although be warned there’s nowhere to store it apart from the magnetic area on the top of the lid. That’s fine when you just want someplace to put it when you are at your desk but useless when in transit.

Buying a Galaxy Book laptop also means you can access the Galaxy ecosystem, assuming you are using other Samsung devices like a Galaxy phone or tablet or Galaxy Buds earphones.

Useful features here include: the ability for your laptop to access your phone’s camera; your earbuds automatically switching from laptop to phone when your phone rings; using your Galaxy Book’s keyboard and mouse to navigate through content on your Samsung smartphone or tablet; and screen sharing with the latest Galaxy Tab tablets.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Review: Price and competition

Configuration Tested: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, Intel Arc Graphics GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 16in, 120Hz, 2,880 x 1,800 AMOLED touchscreen. Price: £1,799

Samsung’s laptop ranges are never the easiest things to understand. At launch, the new 4th-gen machines include the 15.6in Galaxy Book4 360 and 16in Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 convertibles, the 16in Galaxy Book4 Ultra with discrete Nvidia graphics and the 14 and 16in Galaxy Book4 Pro notebooks with Intel’s integrated graphics. Prices range from £1,499 for the Galaxy Book4 360 to £3,549 for a fully loaded RTX 4070-packing Book4 Ultra.

At the time of writing, Samsung is offering a free Galaxy Tab S9 FE tablet with selected models, including the 16in Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, which is an offer not to be sniffed at.

A cheaper (£1,099) but smaller alternative is the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED, a stunning-looking affair with a sumptuous OLED touchscreen that refreshes at 120Hz. It also has an imposing sound system, US MIL-STD 810H-spec ruggedness and a large battery.

The 15in M2 Apple MacBook Air is the benchmark for superlight laptops and is slightly cheaper than the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 at £1,599, although you only get 8GB of RAM and no touchscreen. It weighs a piffling 1.24kg and delivers epic battery life.

Huawei’s MateBook 16s is now on sale for just £1,099 and offers a potent Core i9-13900H CPU. It’s a sleek and desirable laptop with an excellent 2,520 x 1,680 IPS touchscreen and has a good selection of ports. For the price, it’s the bargain of the year.

If you can live with an older CPU and lower-resolution but still AMOLED screen, Samsung is selling the 15.6in Galaxy Book2 Pro for just £999. The display is only Full HD, and the CPU is a 12th-gen Intel Core i7-1260P, but it’s still worth a look at for the price.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Review: Design and build quality

Samsung hasn’t been particularly bold with the design of the Galaxy Book4 series, which all look very much like the previous Galaxy Book3 machines. An angular and sharp-edged affair built from anodised aluminium, it’s available in two unadventurous colourways: Moonstone Grey and Platinum Silver.

It looks very smart, however, and the build quality is excellent, especially the two hinges, which do a good job of keeping the two halves at whichever angle you set them. That’s vital in a convertible that’s going to spend a fair amount of time either folded flat in tablet mode or arched up in tent mode. Like most convertibles, the Galaxy Book4 360 doesn’t have physical volume controls on the side, so you can’t easily adjust the volume when using it as a tablet.

It’s open to argument if 1.66kg is too heavy for a tablet but that’s not a lot of weight for a 16in laptop. At 355 x 252 x 13mm (WDH), the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 is impressively petite, only a few millimetres larger than the 15in MacBook Air.

And, for such a slim machine, connectivity is excellent. On the left side, you’ll find a pair of 40Gbits/sec Thunderbolt 4 ports alongside a full-size HDMI 2.1 video output, while on the right side is a microSD card slot, a single 5Gbits/sec USB-A port and a 3.5mm headset jack. There’s support for 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, too, thanks to Intel’s AX211 Wi-Fi adapter.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Review: Keyboard, touchpad, and webcam

The keyboard is a little on the shallow side, with a rather short key travel, but the keyboard deck’s impressive solidity and the crisp, positive action of the keys make up for that. Typing, as a result, is a largely enjoyable experience.

The layout is decent, too, with a full-sized numeric keypad, a three-stage white backlight and crystal-clear key cap graphics. If I had to pick a hole, it would be with the half-height cursor keys when there is clearly room for a full-sized set.

The trackpad is another great feature; it’s an absolute whopper, measuring 150 x 110mm. Any bigger and you could turf it and use it for a game of football. Plus, the click action is perfectly weighted and not too loud, making it ideal for use in quiet environments.

The webcam is a standard 1080p 30fps affair, which I found to be rather grainy in anything other than perfect light. If you own a Samsung Galaxy phone, you can seamlessly transfer the webcam feed from your phone, making the laptop camera superfluous, which may well be why the 60fps recording capability of the Galaxy Book3 Pro has been dispensed with.

The camera does not support Windows Hello facial recognition, either, which limits biometric security to the fingerprint scanner in the keypad’s top-right corner.

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Review: Display and audio

Something would be seriously amiss if Samsung launched an OLED laptop with a substandard display, so it should be no surprise that the Galaxy Book4’s 16in 2,880 x 1,800 120Hz Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel is a cracker.

With Windows in SDR mode, peak brightness is a solid 385cd/m2, but in HDR, that jumps to 575cd/m2 from a 10% white rectangle against a black background, which is more than enough to earn the Book4 its VESA DisplayHDR 500 certification.

There’s colour aplenty, too, with gamut volumes of 167.8% sRGB, 115.6% AdobeRGB and 118.8% DCI-P3. The screen has four profile settings: Vivid, sRGB, DCI-P3 and AdobeRGB. Measured against the last three, the Delta E variance landed at 1.4, 1.2 and 0.7, respectively.

The Delta E numbers may not be as good as the Galaxy Book3 Pro we tested last year, but those results – all less than 0.6 – were truly outstanding by any measure, while the numbers from the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 are just very good.

Cold data aside, the Galaxy Book4’s screen looks superb in both SDR and HDR modes with gloriously saturated colours and the perfect contrast ratio that only OLED screens can deliver. That 120Hz refresh rate and minimal response time mean motion handling is equally good, with no ghosting or blurring.

The cherry on the Galaxy Book4 screen’s cake is the finish. It’s matte enough to keep reflections at bay but gloss enough not to look matte, and so detract from the limpid impression you get from high-gloss OLED panels.

Equally good are the laptop’s Dolby Atmos-enabled AKG quad speakers system. This comprises two 5W woofers and two 2W full-range drivers and delivers a deep, rich, mellifluous sound that impresses no matter what you’re listening to. It’s loud, too, generating 77.3dB(A) measured from a pink noise source at 1m.

The screen and speaker system together make the Galaxy Book4 Pro a media machine par excellence.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Review: Performance and battery life

The Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 scored 292 points in our in-house 4K multimedia benchmark, slightly ahead of the Asus competition but behind the Acer Swift, all three of which use the same 16-core Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 155H CPU.

All three Windows machines outpace the M2 MacBook Air in this test, but all four are left choking in the dust by the sheer grunt of the Core i9-13900H-powered Huawei MateBook 16s.

That score means the Galaxy Book4 360 is capable of chewing through all but the most demanding tasks in short order (by way of comparison, the first Galaxy Book Pro, launched in mid-2021, used a Core i7-1165G7 chip and scored a measly 126 points) but it is a little susceptible to thermal throttling if you push it hard. After 20 minutes of running FurMark and Prime95, which taxes the GPU and CPU to the hilt, the bottom of the case hit 49.4°C, and the CPU utilisation dropped to around 60%.

In mitigation, I should point out that the fan noise generated by the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 was impressively low, something we’ve not been able to say about some Galaxy Book Pros of yore, so some throttling in extreme circumstances is not an entirely unreasonable compromise.

The big deal with the new Metro Lake SoCs is the much-improved performance of the new Arc iGPU, which is now faster than AMD’s previously class-leading Radeon 780M iGPU. In the GeekBench 6 OpenCL test, the new Intel graphics chip scored nearly 35,000, double that of the Raptor Lake Xe iGPU.

The new Arc iGPU doesn’t turn the Galaxy Book4 360 into a gaming laptop, but it can play less demanding games like Prodeus at Full HD and 60fps, which is good enough.

In our video run-down test, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro’s 76Wh lasted a little shy of 14 hours, which is impressive for an Intel machine. The Apple MacBook Air can do better, but only by 15%, making the Galaxy Book4 one of the few Windows laptops not to be left in the dust by Apple’s torch bearer.

What’s more, the Galaxy Book4’s storage offering is decent, too. Our review sample arrived with a Western Digital WDSN740 SSD inside, which proved quick out of the blocks, recording sequential read and write speeds of 4,270MB/sec and 3,447MB/sec, respectively.

But 512GB is quite mean for a £1,799 laptop, especially one you can’t open up to swap out the drive for a higher capacity one. No screws are visible on the underside of the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, so trying to gain access to the innards would involve ripping off the rubber feet at the very least.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 Review: Verdict

Such faults as the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 exhibits – no garage for the free S Pen stylus, some thermal issues when you thrash it, a rather cramped SSD and minimal opportunities to upgrade after purchase – are pretty minor and not uncommon to the breed.

In the counterbalance, we must consider the excellent display and speaker system, the high-quality keyboard, the Savannah-sized trackpad and the impressive (and not just by Intel standards) battery life. Does that make the Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 the best 16in ultralight on the market right now? In a word, yes.