Lap of luxury
LAPTOP ❘ £1,699 from Currys www.snipca.com/49549
As you might expect from its price, the 16in Galaxy Book4 Pro is one of the slickest laptops around, measuring just 12.5mm in thickness (when closed) and weighing only 1.6kg. Despite its lean design, Samsung has squeezed in an ample selection of ports, with two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports on the left, along with an HDMI socket that can support an 8K screen at 60Hz. On the right you’ll find a USB 3.0 port, microSD card slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack (all pictured below). The built-in Wi-Fi 6E guarantees nippy network coverage.
The keyboard makes use of the extra space by including a number pad, which makes perfect sense given its width, but Samsung has positioned this to the left, spoiling what is otherwise a symmetrical design.
The keyboard is one of the best you’ll find on a laptop. The keys don’t travel far, but they’re dampened, quiet and well spaced. Our only gripe is the use of half-height cursor keys that double up on the functions rather than separate Pg Up, Pg Dn, Home and End buttons (although these are present in the number pad).
The touchscreen is an AMOLED panel, with a resolution of 2880x1800 pixels and a slick refresh rate of 120Hz. In its default mode it covers an outstanding 98 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour standard and has a peak brightness of 398cd/m2. That makes visibility good enough for almost any lighting conditions and is further helped by its anti-reflective finish.
Performance comes from the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, paired with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. That’s the same processor you’ll find in our current favourite laptop, the Acer Swift Go 14 (£899 from www.snipca.com/49551, reviewed in Issue 677 – see page 30).
Not surprisingly, their respective performance levels are similar, though in our benchmark tests the Swift Go had the edge, while the Book4 Pro was marginally better at graphically intensive tasks, such as gaming. There’s very little in it, though.
The Book4 Pro’s larger design provides more room for a bigger battery, and it lasted an impressive 12 hours 19 minutes in our tests, compared with nearly 10 hours. That’s quite a difference, but at £700 more you are paying a fair amount for that larger screen and longer running time.
SPECIFICATIONS
Sixteen-core Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor • 16GB RAM • Intel Arc graphics • 16in 2880x1800-pixel screen • 512GB SSD • 2x USB-C ports • 1x USB 3.0 port • 1x HDMI por
