Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 Review

The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 (starting at $1,699.99; $1,899.99 as tested) is the premium 2-in-1 laptop in Samsung's new Galaxy Book lineup. The company sells other Book3 360 convertibles with 13.3- and 15.6-inch screens, but the Pro model exclusively offers a 16-inch AMOLED touch screen with a game-worthy 120Hz refresh rate. With its high-end display and impressive battery life, it's no surprise the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 comes in at the high end of the convertible cost spectrum, but that steep price and its relatively lackluster performance keep it from challenging capable midrange machines like the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 Gen 7.

Well-Built, But With a Common Convertible Flaw

The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360's large screen contributes to a 3.6-pound weight, making it more of a desktop replacement than an ultraportable, but it has the build of a high-class executive laptop. It's like a large blade of metal with a narrow but weighty shell that uses metal and glass everywhere except for the keycaps and four rubber feet on the bottom.

Construction is solid with little flex, though the keyboard deck yields a bit when pressed and the screen hinge can wobble slightly. Unfortunately, Samsung doesn't seem to have cracked one of the issues that's common among 360-degree-hinged laptops: The display has a large, nearly inch-thick bezel below it. This gives the otherwise deliciously designed machine a dated appearance.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Based on Samsung's Dynamic AMOLED 2X technology, the 16-inch touch screen shows off a sharp 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution and a 16:10 aspect ratio. It offers both 60Hz and 120Hz refresh rate modes. In keeping with its tablet design, the display has rounded corners not usually seen on Windows laptops. I didn't often see content getting cut off because of the curved corners, as the 16:10 aspect ratio provides a bit of extra buffer to fit common 16:9 widescreen content with black letterboxing at the top and bottom. 

The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 is one of the thinnest 16-inch laptops we've seen, measuring only half an inch tall despite its convertible hinge. Its footprint is 14 by 9.9 inches (WD). For comparison's sake, the abovementioned Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 is 0.76 by 14.2 by 9.8 inches (HWD) and the HP Spectre x360 16 is 0.78 by 14.1 by 9.7 inches. The Samsung is the lightest of the three (the Lenovo is 4.19 pounds and the HP is 4.45 pounds).

Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 Configurations and Other Features

The Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 comes in only two configurations, which share the same display, 16GB of memory (RAM), and Intel Core i7-1360P processor (four Performance cores, eight Efficient cores, 16 threads) or CPU. The $1,699 base model has a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD), while our $1,899 test unit doubles the storage to 1TB. It's worth noting that the Galaxy Book3 non-Pro models aren't terribly different, with the same CPU, memory, and storage options but 1,920-by-1,080-pixel screens. They also lack the S Pen stylus that comes with the Pro, although the latter laptop has no niche or slot in the chassis to store it.

The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360's webcam records in 1080p instead of lowball 720p resolution, though its images were a bit softer than I was expecting. This webcam won't hold a candle to the pictures even cheap smartphones produce from their front-facing cameras. Nor does the webcam support Windows Hello facial recognition, something you might reasonably expect in this price range, though the keyboard does have a fingerprint reader that worked effectively in my testing.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

As for audio, the convertible has a pair of woofers and tweeters that run along the bottom edges of the frame. They may be partially obstructed if using the laptop on your lap instead of a desk, but I found they were loud enough to hear even in less-than-ideal conditions. They won't fill a large room, but they're plenty for a small space even with some ambient noise.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Samsung could do worse with its port selection. You'll find two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports and an HDMI monitor port on the left side of the laptop. The Thunderbolt ports also accommodate the AC adapter, making it a bit disappointing that both are on the same side. The system's right flank provides a USB 3.2 Type-A port, an audio headset jack, and a microSD card reader. While a 16-inch laptop is big enough to accommodate more ports, adding them would likely come at the cost of thinness.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

As should be expected at this price, the laptop's wireless connectivity is up to par with Wi-Fi 6E as well as Bluetooth. If you're coming to this machine without a matching Samsung phone, you might be caught off guard by the many Samsung apps that come preinstalled. I found them a bit excessive, but users in the Samsung ecosystem will find they provide effective tools for moving tasks and data between devices.

Tactile Typing Pleasure

The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360's keyboard is fairly standard for laptops this size, combining a primary set of keys with a top row of function keys with system shortcuts. It has half-height arrow keys clustered together below the right Shift key, avoiding the common mistake of a shrunken Shift key and awkward up arrow. There's a numeric keypad, but it's condensed into three columns instead of the usual four with math operators near the top. The keys have short travel, a little wiggle when tapped in the corners, and they're fairly flat, which can make it hard to feel the centers of the keycaps.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

On the plus side, the keys' snappy response provides a fast typing experience. The short travel took me a little getting used to, but I didn't struggle to get up to speed, reaching 103 words per minute with 98% accuracy in Monkeytype. The keyboard backlighting effectively lights up the keycap legends, allowing for easy use in dark rooms. While the size of the keypad keys makes numeric entry easy, the unusual positioning of the arithmetic keys may slow you down if you're used to a conventional pad.

Keys aside, Samsung's touchpad is a boon. It's almost absurdly large, but joyfully tactile in its lower half. Better yet, its size doesn't contribute to accidental right clicks. While some touchpads count any taps on the right half as clicks—something all too easy to do on large left-aligned pads—the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360's touchpad only registers presses in its lower right corner as right clicks.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The luxurious touch display makes working with the laptop even more pleasant. The AMOLED panel offers stunning color and contrast, as well as smooth video thanks to its 120Hz refresh rate, and touch operations are quick and easy. The stylus support can be convenient for signing a document or marking up a PDF, but I found the screen's palm rejection finicky, often failing to ignore the side of my hand when I was trying to annotate a document. The result was a lot of scrolling, window resizing, and blocked stylus inputs.

Testing the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360: Measuring Intel's Midrange ‘Raptor Lake'

While many thin and light laptops cost less than $1,000 these days, the Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 isn't one, bordering the high-end or “prosumer” category of notebooks with more extreme price tags. At $1,899, our test unit has to contend with quite a few other impressive machines like the HP Spectre x360 16, Acer Swift Edge 16, and Dell XPS 15 OLED. More affordable yet capable systems like the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16 put Samsung's premium placement into context.

Productivity Tests

To assess how a machine will perform in everyday tasks, we use UL's PCMark 10 to simulate office and content-creation workflows and measure performance for office-centric jobs such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to measure the access time and throughput of a laptop's boot drive. 

Three more benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better). 

We also run workstation vendor Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, but since the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 was unable to complete this test, we have not included results for it.

Any score above 4,000 points in PCMark 10's productivity suite indicates that a machine will hold up well with everyday productivity apps. The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 easily cleared this hurdle, claiming the silver medal behind the Dell XPS 15, and also won in the storage benchmark.

Intel's new “Raptor Lake” 13th Generation CPU scored well but didn't break any records, since it's an intermediate-power P-series instead of a higher-wattage H-series chip. It did outrun the Spectre x360 16, but we haven't tested that laptop's 2023 edition with 13th Generation Intel silicon. Regrettably, the Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 balked at our PugetBench for Photoshop benchmark, as a handful of laptops have done, though it's certainly capable of content creation tasks.

Graphics Tests

We test Windows PCs' graphics with a pair of DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, the relatively low-intensity Night Raid (suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and the more demanding Time Spy (best for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We also run two tests from the cross-platform GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. However, since the Samsung laptop was not able to complete either GFXBench test, we have not included the results for the other systems here.

Despite year-on-year improvements to Intel's integrated graphics, Intel's Iris Xe graphics silicon falls short of even low-end dedicated GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. It's fine for video streaming and light photo or video editing, as well as solitaire or casual gaming, but it can't compete with the likes of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3050 Ti.

Battery and Display Tests

To get a measure of how long a laptop can last without AC power, we play a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness set to 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and 100% brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

As I've said already, Samsung's AMOLED screen is a real looker. It's about as colorful as they come, hitting 100% of the sRGB and almost as much of the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces and topping 400 nits in everyday brightness (even though we consider 350 nits more than bright enough for OLED panels and only demand 400 from IPS displays). However, it's not unique in this group, as the XPS 15 OLED, Swift Edge 16, and Spectre x360 16 all offer similarly splendid viewing. Only the Yoga 7i 16 comes up short due to its IPS screen technology.

The Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 sets itself apart, however, in battery life, lasting nearly 17 hours in our video rundown. Only the Lenovo does better, and that's not exactly a fair contest since the Yoga's screen has fewer pixels and is considerably dimmer when set to 50% brightness.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Verdict: A Little Too Pricey to Stand Out

The Samsung Galaxy Book3 Pro 360 is an elegantly built big-screen convertible and is appealing if a thin design, a relatively low weight, and long battery life are important to you. Its steep price and average performance keep it from clobbering the competition (namely the Lenovo Yoga 7i 16), however, and it doesn't shine as a tablet due to poor palm rejection and the lack of a stylus storage slot. The Samsung is a respectable 2-in-1, but it's not a slam dunk.