The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is a monster laptop designed to grab the attention of people looking for the very best flashy and portable PCs.

It has a massive OLED screen, an almost comically huge touchpad, the very latest Intel processors, and can pull off moves a MacBook Pro 16 simply can't. And yet it's still way less expensive than the Apple alternatives.

A bargain? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360's charms don't come cheap. Howeever, the only lingering issues are fairly minor, like a flexible hinge that wobbles a bit too much for our liking.

Design and build

• 2-in-1 design
• 355.4 x 252.2 x 12.8mm, 1.66kg (Wi-Fi) / 1.71kg (5G)
• Graphite or Beige colours

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is one of the more impressively-built laptops we've used in the last 12 months. None of that is probably too evident from our pictures, where the one main stand-out is the gigantic touchpad.

It's the combination of the large screen, the metallic feel and fantastic rigidity that does it for us. The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 has the kind of sense of dense quality that is not all that common even among pricey laptops.

You can thank aluminium for that. The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360's body panels are made of the stuff, just like a MacBook's, and this has that lovely cool, hard, metallic feel that lighter magnesium alloys lack.

As a result, the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 isn't the lightest 16-inch laptop around. It weighs 1.66kg, 400g-plus more than an Acer Swift Edge. However, we still consider this laptop great for portable use, as its 12.8mm thickness makes the thing so easy to slip into a rucksack.

We've used this laptop for working out and about a bunch. It's great in this role, and even feels right at home on your knees thanks to the smooth, largely flat underside. Nice work, Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is also a hybrid, with a 360-degree hinge that can hold its position at almost any angle.

On the positive front, there's better reason for this hinge to exist than in most other hybrids, because the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 comes with Samsung's signature S Pen pressure sensitive stylus. A massive screen that can turn into a digital sketchpad? We'll have some of that.

On a less positive note, the hinge is pretty susceptible to micro-wobbles that can be quite distracting thanks to the reflection-happy glossy display finish. We even noticed it happening while working on a desk, when in an office with harsh overhead lighting.

We've seen this wobbliness in previous Samsung laptops. It means you can open the laptop with a single finger, often seen as a mark of class, but we'd trade that in to get rid of the jiggle.

Display and hardware

• 13-gen Intel Core i5/i7, Intel Iris Xe
• 8-32GB RAM, 256-1TB storage
• 76Wh battery, 65W charging
• 2880 x 1800 AMOLED 2X, 120Hz
• Supports touch, S Pen compatible
• 100% DCI P3 colour coverage

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is a good showcase for the screen tech of Samsung's Display arm. It has a 16-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display, of 2880 x 1800 pixels. This leaves it with just enough pixel density to avoid the obviously pixellated look that can be a problem on cheaper OLED laptops - yes, affordable OLED PCs are a thing now.

Thanks to the emissive pixels of OLED, contrast is perfect in a dark room. And pretty damn good in a well-lit one too. You can just make out the border of the screen, suggesting the screen architecture reflects a tiny bit of light. Colour depth is fantastic though, and this is one of the few types of laptop that can actually do justice to HDR video.

It's also a 120Hz panel, which means fast-moving objects like the mouse cursor, and scrolling app icons, look smoother.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360's display brightness isn't even close to that of a MacBook Mini LED display, but that's no surprise. Laptop OLED panels just don't get that bright yet. This one tops out at around 400 nits, compared to up to 1600 nits from Apple's best.

You won't often want to use more than 400 nits anyway, certainly not indoors. But it does mean the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 struggles a little with clarity outdoors thanks to its reflective glass surface.

As you'd expect from a hybrid laptop, this is also a touchscreen, with support for Samsung's S Pen stylus as we mentioned previously.

Keyboard and touchpad

• 3-stage keyboard backlight
• Mechanical Samsung Clickpad

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 must have one of the largest touchpads ever jammed into a laptop. This thing is huge, closer to the size of an add-on accessory that a designer or other creative type might buy.

Samsung has not gone with the current trend of using a haptic system for the pad, though. This is a classic mechanical clicker, a fact we don't mind at all when so many haptic touchpads lack the robust feedback of classic designs like this one.

The clicker feels good here, if lacking a bit of the lovely mellow sensibility of MIcrosoft's best pads. This is also a textured glass surface, as you'd expect, for the smoothest finger glide.

There is a downside to using a mechanical clicker, though. It gets progressively harder to press as you head up the pad, becoming basically unclickable in the top inch. We could argue it doesn't matter when the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 provides more space than most people will reasonably need or use, but it's worth mentioning all the same.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360's keyboard is less notable, but is still decent. Like most laptops of this style, the keys are shallow. But they do have enough feedback to give you confidence when typing, and to add a sense of substance to the key movement too.

We are also pleasantly surprised by how litle the NUM pad mucks up the feel. Add a NUM pad to a laptop and it shunts the rest of the keys off the left a bit, and yet here, the typing position feels quite natural.

However, it does cause some issues, making your natually reach for the right side of the touchpad when you want a left click (but the right side fires off a "right" click). The solution, if you experience this, is to tell Windows to use a two finger click for right clicking instead.

Other features include a fingerprint scanner baked into the blank power button at the top-right of the keyboard, and there's a key backlight with three intensity levels.

Good keyboard, massive touchpad, large screen - these are all elements that make the Galaxy Book a pretty compelling work laptop.

Performance

• Intel Core i7-1360P CPU
• 16GB LPDDR5

How much of a performance laptop is the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 really, though? It uses cutting-edge tech at the time of its launch, but is powerful by the standards of slim and light portable PCs, not workstations or gaming laptops.

It uses the Intel Core i7-1360P with 16GB RAM and a 500GB SSD. It has been completely silent most of the time we've spent working on the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, only revving up its fan when you ask it to do something significantly more taxing than just writing docs and web browsing.

There are fans here, though.

Samsung gives you control. Using a function key shortcut you can cycle between Silent, Quiet, Optimised and HIgh performance modes. Each one takes off a successive set of training wheels, raising the performance ceiling while increasng the chances the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360 will generate more noise. However, we're impressed by how subtle the fan tone is. It's more subtle whoosh than mosquito whine.

The only performance issue here we might raise is that while the 13th Gen Intel processors are great for CPU performance and all-round efficiency, they don't really make any great strides on the gaming side. You still get Intel Xe based graphics, just like the last gen, where the newest AMD processors have significantly more gaming power.

Still, the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 can stil handle games like The WItcher 3 just fine.

Battery life and features

• 76Wh battery
• 65W USB-C charging

Laptops with AMD processors typically last longer off a charge than Intel ones, like the chip that's in the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360. However, this laptop also has a pretty high-capacity battery, 76Wh.

We find it can last around 9 to 9.5 hours when doing very light work, such as writing documents. This will drop closer to 6.5 hours if you let your browser tab etiquette run wild, and open up a bunch of browser windows, as we have been known to do.

It's not a brilliant performance, but it's not too shabby for a laptop with a powerful Intel processor. Can you do better elsewhere? Absolutely.

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 also has a decent spread of connections for a laptop of this style. As well as a couple of fast Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, we get a full-size HDMI, a trusty old USB-A, headphone jack and a microSD card slot.

The speakers are powerful too, a quad driver array tuned by Samsung-owned AKG. Volume is good, they project well and there is a hit of lower frequency punch that helps give music a bit of weight.

We're not quite at the level of the MacBook Pro 16 here, but the Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is one of the best-sounding WIndows laptops we've heard.

While the Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is a Windows 11 machine, the Galaxy part of its name cannot be overlooked. The laptop is designed to work within Samsung's ecosystem, to integrate with Galaxy Tab and Galaxy phones to make your life easier.

That means you'll get features like instant hotspot (if you don't have a 5G model), and you'll also be able to extend the display with Second Screen, so you could use your Galaxy Tab as a wireless external display to give you more space to work or play.

There are other convenience features, like being able to sync your Expert RAW images from the Galaxy S23 Ultra directly with your Galaxy Book, so you can take photos and have them open for editing on the laptop instantly. All handy features if you've already bought into the Samsung ecosystem.

Finally, the laptop has a 1080p webcam rather than the 720p kind that was the standard in laptops until recently. This thing won't compete with the selfie camera of a good phone, turning pretty mushy in low light. But there's a very good chance it'll easily beat your old laptop's webcam.

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is a tastefully designed no-compromise style laptop that balances portability and build quality well. This is one of those PCs that feels as expensive as it costs. Sure you can get comparable laptops that weigh hundreds of grams less, but they won't feel anywhere near as solid.

Display quality is great, the S Pen stylus adds a neat creativity angle, and the 13th Gen Intel CPU puts plenty of power at your fingertips.

Its battery won't anywhere near as long as an M2 CPU MAcBook's under pressure, and the hinge is a touch loose for our tastes, but this is a top option if you want good portability without losing that premium feel, or a great big work surface.