Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 review: Is $1.700 worth it for a windows convertible? 

The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 promises a ton of features on paper. These include a high-resolution AMOLED screen, latest Intel Core processors, up to 32GB of RAM, and a 16 inch touchscreen that you can turn around to transform it into a large Windows tablet. Even the S Pen is included. However, priced at at least 1700$, it’s crazy expensive. Is spending that much really worth it? We’ve tested all features of this laptop extensively, so let’s get into it. 

Design and build

The new Samsung Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 is an elegant laptop in every way. From the aluminium covered chassis to the impossibly thin bezels on the front display, it’s an absolute sight to behold.

Less is more is the name of the game. Aside from a Samsung logo, there’s not much to see on the backside. Corners are rounded and cute, but this notebook is anything but that; the Samsung Book 5 Pro 360 feels like an edgier Macbook, featuring the same flat surfaces, premium aluminium build and black backlit keyboard with a huge trackpad. The keyboard keys are squarer than the Macbook’s, and the edges of the chassis are just a bit sharper and less rounded. The entire design feels very serious and businesslike.

We’re happy to report that there is no lack of connectivity options. On the left side, we find 2 USB type C Thunderbolt 4 ports and a full sized HDMI port. The right side carries a USB 3.2 type-A port, a 3.5mm audio output port and a micro-SD card slot – something that may come in handy if you don’t want to pay Samsung’s ludicrous storage upgrade prices. A full sized SD-card reader would obviously be better, especially for photographers and content creators.

On the top right side of the keyboard, we find the power button with an inbuilt fingerprint reader that works reliably.

Display

The 16,0’ 2.880 x 1.800p AMOLED display here might just justify this laptop’s hefty price. Although peak brightness in SDR is only 400 nits and only 500 in HDR, we find the dimness of the display to be a non-issue in daily use, even in brightly lit rooms and outdoors. However, if low brightness is a problem for you, you can also check out Lenovo’s recent Yoga Pro 9i Aura Edition, which costs about the same and gets up to a whole 1600 nits in HDR.

Pixel density is excellent, colours are vibrant and punchy, and the Galaxy Book display supports a whole 120Hz of variable refresh rate. And we haven’t even gotten to the best part:

Samsung has finally managed to fix our biggest problem with most OLED laptop displays; this display barely reflects light at all, even in the worst conditions! This is all thanks to Samsung’s Anti-Reflective technology, which can be found on their Galaxy S Tablets as well. 

The “360” naming in Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 very obviously sets the expectation that this laptop can be used with the screen flipped around. In our testing, it feels great in tablet mode, although the 16’ screen might be a bit on the large side to hold comfortably for long periods of time. The touchscreen works excellently, and the included S pen also functions much better than you might expect for a windows machine. We’ll get to the S Pen writing experience later. 

Keyboard

We have a couple issues with the Galaxy Book 5’s keyboard. The worst one might be the razor sharp edge we find on the bottom of the frame where your wrists usually rest when typing. This makes typing on any elevated surface, quite frankly, very uncomfortable.

Here’s another couple issues: there’s plenty of space to be had on the 16 inch frame, but the inclusion of a number pad means that the keyboard still feels slightly cramped to type on. The arrow keys are way too small, and keys feel a bit shallow with little travel distance.

It feels wrong to give this keyboard a bad score, since Samsung has nailed the general typing experience of the keys themselves. The bottom frame of the Book 5 is also very solid, and the keys have zero wobble and are decently tactile despite being shallow. But the cons definitely outweigh the pros here.

Trackpad: Samsung has opted to put the biggest trackpad they can possibly fit below the keyboard of the notebook chassis. It’s also off center. This decision was probably made so that when not using the numpad, the trackpad is actually centered right below the typing area. Still, we find the placement of the trackpad a little bit awkward. Aside from that, the trackpad responds accurately to input, and the massive size means you’ll never run out of space when scrolling. 

Performance

Performance is good on the Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360. Currently, the laptop is available with either a core Ultra 5 processor with 32GB of ram, or an Ultra 7 with 16 or 32GB of ram. Our test model has an Ultra 7 256v with 16 GB of on package ram, meaning that there’s unfortunately no way for the user to upgrade the RAM by themselves. 

Aside from the RAM limitations, the core Ultra 7 256v is the perfect chip choice for an ultra thin and light laptop like the Galaxy Book. With 8 CPU cores and 7 GPU cores, this chipset is sure to breeze through any office task and light productivity test you throw at it. Even better is the mere 37 watts of peak power draw of the 256v, which allows the laptop to run for much longer without thermal throttling.

To get a better feeling for how this laptop performs, we put it through a couple different benchmarks to test performance across a wide range of tasks.

In Geekbench 6, we see that the Galaxy Book performs almost just as well as the Core Ultra 7 258v equipped Acer Swift 14 AI, being just  ~5% slower in CPU and GPU benchmarks. Compared to the older Intel processors found in the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 and 10, performance is significantly better. The Galaxy Book outperforms the Core i5 135U in the Surface Pro 10 by a whole 65% despite the two laptops having processors whcih released one year apart. The performance is also significantly better than the Qualcomm X Elite based Surface Pro 11.

Lets test the GPU some more. In 3Dmark, the Acer Swift 14 AI leads the Galaxy Book by only 10% in tests. Realistically, you shouldn’t notice a massive difference between the performance of either chips in graphically demanding tasks. 

Something we did notice about the Galaxy Book is that the fan curve seems to be tuned pretty conservatively; the laptop stays silent most of the time. During multitasking and gaming, however, the fans only start spinning when the chassis becomes hot to the touch. We found this pretty irritating, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to change this. The chip also starts throttling after the chassis warms up enough. Gaming FPS begins to drop after around 10 minutes of use, unfortunately.

The Galaxy Book has no issues in Photoshop. We imported large RAW files for editing and performance seems to be alright. It’s only when we add a lot more layers and filters on the original file where the laptop starts to become sluggish, since even 16GB of RAM tends to fill up pretty quickly.

Drawing with the S-Pen feels snappy, and functions like palm-rejection still work well. Overall, using the Galaxy Book 5 360 primarily as a productivity laptop should be a great experience, although the 32GB RAM configurations might be better suited for the task. 

Gaming 

Honestly, you shouldn’t buy this laptop if you’re a gamer. Much more powerful gaming laptops with a discrete GPU and no touchscreen can be found for cheaper. However, doing light gaming on the side is possible.

We tested Counter Strike 2, Fortnite and Marvel Rivals and a couple other games. One thing we noticed is that the HDR compatible 120hz OLED display really elevates video game graphics to a whole new level. However, hitting that 120Hz refresh rate limit seems to be a bit too challenging for this device.

Counter Strike 2 is able to hit 120FPS with low settings, and League of Legends has no trouble running on this laptop either. However, we were surprised at how badly Marvel Rivals performs here; On very low settings with ultra performance XeSS upscaling enabled, we only get an average 70 FPS. The game also looks terrible with these settings.

Demanding games should probably be avoided for the sake of our laptop, but lightweight games like Risk Of Rain 2, Minecraft or Civilisations run great. Battery drain is not too bad during gaming as well, so all around it’s an okay experience.

Read: Best Gaming Tablets for Playing Games Reviewed

Battery life

The Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360 has incredible battery life, lasting a whole 15 hours in continuous HD Youtube video playback. It’s the highest score received by any laptop in our testing so far!

Alongside a 76Wh battery with 65 watts charging speed, we also get an OLED display and Intel’s efficiency focused chipset, which all contribute to this excellent score.

In real world use, we are able to go 2 days without a charge when the laptop is only used for light office tasks, video streaming and light browser gaming. Compared to our Lenovo X13 2-in-1 with an older Intel processor, the difference is night and day. 

The S Pen

The most compelling argument for this laptop, at least in our opinion, is the support for Samsung’s excellent S-Pen ecosystem. Samsung sends you an included standard S-Pen alongside with the notebook itself. We can happily report that the S Pen works just as well on Windows as on Samsung’s Android tablets. The writing and drawing experience is smooth and satisfying, palm detection works great, and the gorgeous screen feels perfect for writing.

Additionally, we get Samsung’s note taking app. Samsung Notes is basically a simplified and improved Microsoft OneNote – OneNote syncing is also supported. 

If you need a windows laptop with a pen for digital art or photoshop, and the Samsung Book 5 360 fits your budget, definitely consider it. The Microsoft Surface 11 is a solid alternative, but it has its own issues as well. 

Speakers

The Galaxy notebook’s speakers fire straight down from the bottom of the chassis, ensuring that sounds are cramped and muddy and there is no bass whatsoever. The smaller, 11’ Surface Pro 11 manages to not only get much louder than the Galaxy Book, but also actually sounds good at the same time. Thankfully the laptop has a 3.5mm audio output to connect your own earphones or speaker to, sparing you from the laptops audio quality – In tent mode, the speakers do sound OK. 

Webcam Quality

The 1080p webcam found on this laptop is not good. With perfect lighting and a bit of luck, video calls might look halfway decent. Again, Microsoft’s Surface Pro 11 completely wins the webcam competition.

We notice the webcam quality drops significantly when the subject is less lit, to the point where it’s not really usable in calls if you’re in a dim room. Definitely a letdown when better cameras can be found in much cheaper laptops. It’s no wonder that there’s no face unlock support for Galaxy Books.

Final verdict

Objectively, this is a good laptop. It’s got a great display, an excellent pen, very long battery life and an elegant design. It’s also great for consuming media. But at a minimum of $1.700, it’s hard to excuse otherwise small issues, like the subpar keyboard, webcam and speakers when the asking price is so incredibly high.

For people who don’t need a touchscreen on their laptop, the somewhat similar looking MacBook Air M is a more reasonably priced option that also performs better. And if you do need a touchscreen, the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 is another valid choice that doesn’t cut as many corners, but might end up costing more because of accessory pricing. Realistically, most buyers who don’t need to edit photos or draw in Photoshop should much rather look into getting a cheaper laptop and a separate android tablet. Photographers and designers might however find a lot of advantages in the Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360.

Read: Microsoft Surface Pro 11 Review: Worth Upgrading To?