25-hour battery life? 16in touchscreen? My favourite laptop of IFA 2024 so far is the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360

Having a gigantic screen on your laptop used to mean terrible battery life, but that’s no longer the case with the latest generation of super efficient laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360. This is a machine with a large 16in touchscreen, yet thanks to the presence of Intel’s latest Core Ultra 200C series CPUs, the company is quoting battery life of up to 25 hours for video playback.

That’s not as long-lasting as the new Dell XPS 13, which can go for up to 30 hours of local video playback. However, the Dell delivers this kind of longevity only for a compact laptop with a comparatively small 13in, IPS Full HD display. This big, beautiful Samsung machine, by contrast, has a 2,880 x 1,800 resolution AMOLED screen with touch and stylus support – if the claims are true, 25 hours of battery life from a laptop like this is far more impressive.

Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 hands-on: Specifications, price and release date

• 16in 2,880 x 1,800 120Hz AMOLED touchscreen display with S-Pen support
• 8-core Intel Core Ultra 7 256V CPU
• 16GB of on-package RAM
• 1TB NVMe SSD
• 1 HDMI 2.1 (Supports 8K@60Hz, 5K@120Hz), 2 x Thunderbolt 4, 1 USB3.2
• Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Dimensions: 355 x 252 x 12.8 mm (WDH)
• Weight: 1.69kg
• Price: £1,699 inc VAT
• Availability: Pre-order from Samsung.com today

Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 hands-on: Key features and first impressions

As with many of the laptops launched at IFA so far, the Book5 Pro 360 isn’t all that new from a physical point of view. It’s the same laptop in appearance and built quality as the 16in Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Pro 360.

The main difference here is that it has one of Intel’s new hyper-efficient Core Ultra 200V series CPUs inside it and – thanks to some fairly significant tweaks to the architecture of the new chips – it would appear that this makes a huge difference when it comes to battery life.

We’ll have to verify this in due course, when I test the laptop for myself but, so far, every laptop manufacturer that is launching laptops at IFA 2024 based on this new chip is claiming highly impressive battery life scores. It’s very promising, in other words.

Intel is also claiming much-improved graphics performance from its new chips – a claimed 30% on average, with support for Ray Tracing, no less – and double the graphics performance of Snapdragon laptops.

There’s also a much more powerful NPU with the chip in the Samsung delivering a peak performance rating of up to 47 TOPS (trillions of operations per second). That’s over four times more powerful than the NPU in the first generation of Intel Core Ultra chips, announced at the back end of 2023.

Unlike other manufacturers, however, Samsung only has this one model featuring the new Intel silicon and it comes with the Core Ultra 7 256V CPU, backed by 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. For this configuration, you’ll be paying £1,699 inc VAT.

It’s a handsome machine, if not particularly exotic looking in a fairly plain silver livery, it’s as well built as all of the Samsung laptops I’ve come across recently and its AMOLED display is absolutely stunning. It measures a mere 12.8mm slim, weighs 1.69kg – again that’s pretty good for a laptop with a display this big and a 360-degree hinge – and appears to be pretty well kitted out when it comes to the practical side of things.

Around the edges of this laptop are one full-sized HDMI 2.1 output, a pair of fast Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, one USB 3.2 socket and a microSD card slot. As for wireless connectivity, as with all the new Intel-based machines, the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 comes with support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 review: Early verdict

I have to be honest, I didn’t expect to be this excited by an Intel laptop at any stage in 2024. With Snapdragon laptops dominating the middle part of the year with amazing battery life and impressive performance, I expected Intel to take at least a year to catch up.

But here we are with a 16in thin-and-light 2-in-1 convertible machine, with a bright, super vibrant AMOLED  touchscreen that delivers up to 25 hours of battery life – and it isn’t from Apple or based on a Snapdragon chip. The battery life alone makes the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 incredibly attractive, but the fact that you’re getting more GPU, NPU and CPU power as well, means laptops like this could seriously rival Apple’s MacBook Air, even the MacBook Pro for all-round battery life and performance.

Perhaps that’s going too far, but the early signs are positive, and I can’t wait to get my hands on one to see if it can live up to this strong first impression.