The premium 2-in-1 has been overhauled for its third generation with new styling, stronger hinges and upgraded interiors. Oh, and the highest-resolution OLED screen Samsung has put on any of its laptops to date. It sounds like a winning combination for anyone after a convertible that will work between business hours and them – does it really deliver?
Design and Build: Attractive from all angles
Weighing just 1.71 kg, the Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is impressively light for a 16-inch laptop. These grams add up when carrying it in tablet form, but we had no complaints while watching videos and web browsing on the sofa. Thin doses help; It’s definitely thicker than the average iPad, but you’re hardly holding a phone book.
You can choose between graphite or beige colors; Our samples were next. Beige looks pretty bland, but in the metal it’s somewhere between silver and pale gold. We think it’s the one to go for, everything looks as premium as you’d expect for the price. It is made from aluminum with sharp lines and minimal branding. It also removes fingerprints, so you don’t have to put in much effort to keep it neat and clean.
Other than how the hinges eat into the lid a bit, there’s little clue that this is a 2-in-1 device. Whether you open the laptop to fold flat for tent and presentation-style setups, as well as tablet use, they’re stable, but not so stiff that you have to close it again.
Connectivity is decent enough for something so thin and light, with twin Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports and an HDMI output on one side and a single USB 3, 3.5mm combi port and microSD card slot on the other. Photographers may lament the lack of a full-size SD card reader, though.
The display bezel also has a built-in 1080p webcam. It’s fine, looks clear enough in good light but struggles for detail in dark rooms.
Screen and Sound: Heavenly HDR
Samsung has offered OLED on its laptops for a while, but last year’s Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360 couldn’t go much higher than Full HD resolution. That puts it on the back foot when compared to Lenovo, Asus and Acer, which all offer 3K panels. Not so here: the Book 3 Pro 360 gets a much sharper 2880×1800 display, which stretches to 16 inches and with a more productivity-minded 16:10 aspect ratio. It works in about 11% more vertical space than the outgoing 16:9 machine, and everything looks noticeably sharper.
It also has a 120Hz refresh rate, which means scrolling through websites and dragging windows around the desktop feels very smooth. It was enabled out of the box, so you don’t have to dig into the settings menu, but it will affect battery life – you might want to dial in 60Hz if longevity is a priority.
This laptop really shines when you feed it HDR content, with exceptional contrast, nearly flawless black levels and a great balance between shadows and highlights. This box-set is ideal for dual viewing, especially once the hinge is placed in tent or presentation mode, with excellent viewing angles and rich, vivid colors. And that’s before Vivid or Movie mode is turned on.
Color accuracy in general is excellent, which is good for creative professionals looking to do serious work. That falls just short of Samsung’s claimed 500nit peak, and the M2 outperforms the MacBook Air.
Get the Dolby Atmos-certified quad speakers right, and the Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 delivers fairly clear audio with the typical laptop caveat of limited bass. The rest of the frequency range is well defined, doing a good enough job of getting Spotify streams to a pair of headphones, and doing a great job of catching up on your YouTube subscriptions. At least a 3.5mm headphone port means you’re not limited to Bluetooth for personal listening.
Keyboard and Touchpad: Input
Surprisingly for a 16in laptop, Samsung has found room for both a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and a numeric keypad. The latter uses slightly shrunk keys, but should still be helpful for office work. White LED backlighting also covers the keyboard tray, and when it’s off during the day, the black keycaps mean you can clearly read every letter if you force it – something that can’t be said about this. Lenovo Yoga Slim 9i Silver/white backlight combo.
Each island-style key has a reasonably bouncy action, with plenty of travel considering how thin the machine is. If you type as if you’re hammering a nail, they still go down quickly, and we noticed things were a little squishier toward the center of the keyboard tray, but it’s perfectly comfortable at a slightly lower volume.
The power button in the top-right corner doubles as a fingerprint sensor and has enough resistance that you’re unlikely to accidentally hit it. We thought it was pretty close to the Delete and Backspace keys on the 14in Galaxy Book 3 Pro laptop, but it’s more on the side of the Num Lock key. It proved fairly accurate during testing and was quick to identify our numbers
The wide glass touchpad slightly offset to one side might trigger your OCD, but it lines up better with the QWERTY keys and is large enough that we never miss reaching for it. Single clicks, multi-finger taps and swipe gestures are all captured with precision and the smooth surface is ideal for smooth cursor movement.
Naturally the 2-in-1’s screen has full touch support, with 10-point detection that’s highly responsive, and it also plays well with Samsung’s S Pen stylus. Comes bundled in a box, but leaving the laptop in a bag or backpack leaves nowhere to store it. It clings to the lid magnetically, but not with as much force as the lip. Input is the smallest bit of latency, so it gets as close to sketching on paper as possible
Performance and Battery Life: Plenty of power
That’s Intel inside the Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 with a choice of 13th-gen Core i5 or i7 CPUs. Our model had the more powerful i7-1360p chip, paired with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. The more mainstream i5-1340p option limits you to 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, though it lowers the price a bit.
Active cooling doesn’t need to kick into high gear for desktop duty, where the machine feels pleasantly responsive and quiet enough when working on something more demanding, like batch editing photos in Adobe Lightroom. Multitasking between text documents, web browsers and email clients is as smooth as you’d expect.
Just remember that this is an ultraportable machine, so it’s not going to destroy 4K video in the same way, and Apple Silicon still has the performance edge in optimized software. This can be palatable when left to crunch through video renders or other sustained loads, but not so much that the hardware is forced to dramatically overclock.
Intel’s Iris Xe graphics gets the job done, playing native 1440p video without any hiccups and even handling some light gaming, but it’s no graphical powerhouse. For that you’ll want the upcoming Galaxy Book 3 Ultra — it’s a traditional laptop rather than a 2-in-1, but you can outfit it with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070.
Samsung didn’t load things up with pre-installed software, with few tools for transferring files or sharing mobile data with Galaxy smartphones and using the Galaxy tablet as a second screen. Otherwise you’re getting a pretty typical Windows 11 experience.
This means fairly typical Windows 11 standby battery life, which is disappointing compared to battery life from macOS. Otherwise, the Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 Main should last 8 to 9 hours, depending on what you’re doing with it. That’s enough to get through a work day without needing a power adapter, but still a step behind the likes of Apple’s excellent MacBook Air M2. Chalk it up to a high resolution, high refresh rate AMOLED display.
At least the power brick is on the small side, no bigger than what you’d expect (get used to) with a new smartphone. At 65W it will charge any existing Samsung phone, tablet or laptop at top speed, so you can leave your other adapters at home.
Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 Verdict
If you’re looking for a high-end hybrid laptop with plenty of power and a great screen, the Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 should be at the top of your list. Samsung has done sleek and modern styling, provided a comfortable keyboard and hasn’t neglected connectivity too much.
Battery life could be better, though, and we’re still waiting for a place to hide the all-important S Pen. It’s also an expensive machine at £1849 – the Acer Swift Edge 2-in-1 is a straightforward laptop, but it has an equally bright OLED screen for significantly less cash.
That said, convertible fans may still consider the Galaxy Book’s flexible form factor worth the price premium.
Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 Technical Specifications
| screen | 16in, 2880×1800, 120Hz AMOLED |
| CPU | Intel 13th-gen Core i7-1360p 2.2GHz |
| memories | 16 GB RAM |
| storage | 512 GB SSD |
| Graphics | Intel Iris XE |
| operating system | Windows 11 Home |
| battery | 76 a |
| connection | USB-C x2, USB, HDMI, microSD, 3.5mm, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth |
| dimension | 355x252x12.8 mm, 1.71 kg |
