Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 review: as small as it is big

Samsung has taken that approach with an even larger 16-inch display with the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360. It’s a convertible 2-in-1 that’s incredibly thin and packs in Intel’s Lunar Lake chipset for more efficiency. It has a few downsides but makes up for it with its great battery life and OLED display.

Specs and configuration

Samsung has a whole line of Galaxy Book laptops, and the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 is the first to be launched in this fifth generation. Samsung will likely flesh out this lineup in the future, including smaller 13-inch models, clamshell-only devices, and more powerful options with discrete GPUs.

There’s also only one configuration of the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 sold by Samsung, which cost $1,700 for a Core Ultra 5 226V chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 16.0-inch 2.8K OLED display. Best Buy, however, is selling a 512GB model, which costs $1,450 and still has the OLED screen.

Either way, that’s quite an expensive laptop. The 512GB model does, however, come in $50 cheaper than the base Apple MacBook Air 15, and Surface Laptop 7th Edition, both of which cost $1,499. Neither of those laptops have an OLED display. Samsung is also currently selling the 1TB model for $200 off, which is a good sign for future price cuts and discounts.

It would be nice to see some additional configurations available, however, especially with different memory and storage options since those are all soldered down and aren’t user-upgradeable.

The Galaxy Book5 might just be the thinnest 16-inch laptop around at just 0.50 inches. The Apple MacBook Air 15 is thinner at 0.45 inches, but that’s not by much and it has a smaller display. Not only that, but the Galaxy Book5 is a 360-degree convertible 2-in-1, which requires a more complex hinge to support revolving through clamshell, media, tent, and tablet modes and providing a pen-enabled touch display.

The Galaxy Book5 is a relatively large laptop in width and depth, though, and that’s due in part to a large bottom chin on the display. Samsung also managed to keep the 2-in-1 fairly light at 3.73 pounds — not the lightest 16-inch laptop but close enough. It’s still light enough — and thin enough — to use as a very large tablet for writing and drawing on the display.

The build quality is also very good. That’s where some extremely thin laptops have issues, but there’s zero bending, flexing, or twisting in the lid, keyboard deck, or chassis. The Surface Laptop 7th Edition is equally well-built, while the MacBook Air 15 has a lid that’s a little bendable. The 2-in-1 hinge feels great and keeps the lid reasonably stable.

Aesthetically, there’s not a lot to say. It’s a dark-gray color way with black keycaps on the keyboard. There’s really nothing that stands out. The Surface Laptop and MacBook Air are both more attractive machines with a mix of elegance and streamlined designs that just look better. It’s not a strike against the Samsung, really; it’s just not a particular strength.

Keyboard and touchpad

One of my least favorite keyboards of all time was Apple’s butterfly keyboard that it abandoned several years ago, which had very shallow switches that felt a bit like typing on a block of wood. The Galaxy Book5’s keyboard isn’t quite that bad, but unfortunately, they give the same vibe. It’s the same keyboard Samsung has been using for years, and it’s not my favorite. In addition to the shallow travel, the keycaps are a little small, making it hard to get used to.

There’s plenty of spacing but the numeric keyboard — an anachronism today — pushes the touchpad a little off center. Some people need a numeric keyboard, but most probably don’t. In general, I just didn’t enjoy using this keyboard very much, and I suspect others might not, either.

The touchpad is plenty large, though, and it works well enough. It uses an old-school mechanical switch, though, and I wish Samsung had opted for a haptic feedback unit. Both the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air 15 have haptic trackpads, and Apple’s Force Touch version is the very best. So unfortunately, again, the Samsung’s touchpad isn’t my favorite.

The display is pen- and touch-enabled, and it all works fine. That’s to be expected with a 2-in-1.

Connectivity and webcam

Connectivity is pretty decent for a thin-and-light laptop. There are a couple of Thunderbolt 4 ports and some legacy ports in USB-A and HDMI. That’s better than both the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air 15, the latter of which is all-in on Thunderbolt 4. You do have to use one of the Galaxy Book5’s Thunderbolt 4 ports for power, while the MacBook has a MagSafe 3 connection and the Surface Laptop has Microsoft’s proprietary Surface port. But still, the Galaxy Book5 is fine here, even offering a microSD card reader that’s becoming increasingly uncommon. Wireless connectivity is fully up-to-date as well.

The webcam is a 1080p version, in line with many of its competitors. As a Microsoft Copilot+ PC, the Galaxy Book5 supports enhance Studio Effects software and the full complement of AI features as they roll out. Those will run reasonably fast and efficient on-device thanks for a fast neural processing unit (NPU).

The Galaxy Book5 is available with the Intel Core Ultra 5 226V, a member of the Lunar Lake chipset, otherwise known as Core Ultra Series 2. Like all Lunar Lake versions, it’s an 8-core/8-thread chipsets consuming 17 watts, and it runs at just a slower clock speed than the Core Ultra 7 258V chipsets used in the other Lunar Lake laptops we’ve reviewed. Its primarily focused on efficiency, and its performance falls somewhere between the older 15-watt U-series and 28-watt H-series Meteor Lake chipsets.

As you can see in our benchmarks, there’s not a huge difference in performance in CPU-intensive tasks. It’s considerably slower than the other efficiency option, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipsets, which are a lot faster. The Core Ultra 5 226V also uses the slower Intel Arc 130V integrated graphics, and that shows up in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark.

The Galaxy Book5 is fast enough for productivity work, but gamers and creators won’t be too excited. You’ll need to opt for the previous-gen Galaxy Book4 Ultra or wait for a next-gen option.

Battery life

With a large, 16.0-inch OLED display and only a 76 watt-hour battery, I wasn’t expecting great battery life. But the Lunar Lake chipset is meant to help with just that.

As it turned out, the Galaxy Book5 did pretty well in our suite of battery tests. At almost 13 hours of web browsing and 19.5 hours of video looping, you’re bound to get a full day’s work out of the machine. That’s pretty impressive. The MacBook Air 15 still leads, especially in web browsing, but Windows laptops are getting much stronger.

Display and audio

The Galaxy Book5’s AMOLED display is spectacular, of course. It’s 16.0 inches at 2.8K (2880 x 1800) running at 120Hz. The resolution isn’t the sharpest, but around 212 ppi (pixels per inch), it’s only slightly less dense than the MacBook Air 15-inch. You likely won’t notice the difference. Otherwise, it’s bright, insanely colorful, and it has OLED’s usual inky black. Reviewing so many OLED laptops has completely spoiled me in this regard.

My colorimeter agrees that this is a very good display. It’s bright at 401 nits, which is well above the 300-nit threshold that we should probably adjust. Almost every display we’ve reviewed in the last couple of years are at least 350 nits and 500-nit displays are becoming more common. Colors are incredibly wide at 100% sRGB, 95% AdobeRGB, and 99% DCI-P3, and they’re very accurate at a Delta-E of 1.08 (just above the 1.0 or less that’s considered excellent). And contrast comes in at 28,020:1 with near-perfect blacks.

Audio quality is only OK, with two downward-firing speakers that are good enough for all but gaming and movie watching. Some other 16-inch laptops have much better sound.

There’s so much to like, and only a few things to complain about

I really like the way the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 feels in hand. It’s so thin and reasonably light for a laptop with a spectacular 16-inch OLED display. And it’s also very well-built, and it gets great battery life. There’s a lot to like here.

But when you buy such a large laptop, you tend to want more performance. The Galaxy Book5 is fast enough as long as you’re doing typical productivity tasks. But it’s not the gaming and creator’s laptop that many larger machines represent. And the keyboard is really disappointing.

For those that really like the idea of a large-format laptop that is still easy to pack around, however, the Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 delivers just enough value to make it worthy of recommendation.