11. Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360: Best 2-in-1 laptop
Price when reviewed: £1,799 | Check price at Amazon | Samsung
Great for… 2-in-1 enthusiasts looking for the ultimate laptop
Not so great for… Penny pinchers looking to save money
Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 Pro is a stunning 2-in-1 laptop with a class-leading OLED display and the latest Intel CPU inside. It’s a beautifully slim laptop that’s an absolute pleasure to use and in our battery life tests it lasted much longer than most Windows rivals – an impressive 13hrs 46mins.
That’s still not anywhere near as long as the 13.6in M2 MacBook Air – it lasted 17 hours in the same test – but the Samsung does offer plenty of other benefits. It has a touchscreen with stylus compatibility, and there’s one included in the box. Plus, it comes with Intel’s latest 16-core Core Ultra 7 155H CPU inside, which brings with it much better graphics performance than previous integrated Intel graphics.
Yes, the price is quite high, but this is truly the best 2-in-1 you can buy right now. In our opinion, it’s well worth the price premium.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360 review
Key specs – Display size: 14.5in; Resolution: 2,880 x 1,800; Type: OLED; CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU; Graphics: Intel Arc Graphics; RAM: 16GB; Storage: 512GB; Dimensions: 355 x 252 x 13mm (WDH); Weight: 1.66kg
How to choose the best laptop for you
Buying a brand-new laptop is no easy task. There are so many brilliant devices to choose from each year, with prices ranging from £200 to £2,000 or more. Cost can also vary massively between different configurations of the same laptop, which only adds to the confusion. In this brief buying guide, we will help you make the right choice by outlining the most important factors to consider before you bust out the bank card.
What do you need your laptop for?
Your personal requirements should dictate what sort of laptop you go for. A typical university student will have different tech needs to a professional video editor. Some may need a laptop that can process large files at rapid speeds, while others may just want to use Google Docs or browse the web. Ultimately, it all comes down to what you want your laptop to do.
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What about performance and battery life?
The most powerful laptops are those with the most powerful CPUs and the highest amount of RAM. A laptop’s CPU power is measured in gigahertz (GHz), and each processor has a baseline frequency as well as a maximum frequency. Other factors can impact overall performance, including poor temperature control, which can lead to thermal throttling. Ideally, any laptop you buy should have at least 4GB of RAM as a minimum. Processors aren’t as easy to pin down – they might be dual-core, quad-core or hexa-core and can range greatly in power.
An Apple MacBook Pro (or Windows equivalent such as the Dell XPS 15) has a much more powerful CPU and more RAM than a cheap Chromebook because people expect them to run multiple demanding applications.
Battery size is measured in milliamp-hours (mAH) or Watt-hours (Wh) – the biggest battery will (in theory) last the longest, but it all depends on how much power the various components inside the device use (the display, CPU and GPU have the biggest impact). An ultra-budget laptop with a small battery size may last longer than a premium notebook with a huge battery because its internal hardware isn’t as demanding. We run a standardised video rundown test on every single laptop we review, with the longest-lasting performers tending to be a mix between efficient high-end ultraportable laptops and low-powered Chromebooks.
What operating system should you go for?
Whether it’s Windows, macOS or Chrome OS, each operating system has its own strengths and weaknesses. macOS is only found in Apple’s own laptops, while Windows powers all sorts of laptops from manufacturers such as Acer, Asus and Lenovo. Google’s low-powered Chrome OS is also rising in popularity and can be found on a wide range of devices.
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When it comes to laptop displays, the resolution isn’t everything. If the same laptop has the option of a Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) display and a 4K (3,840 x 2,160) display, the latter is usually more expensive but not necessarily sharper. How sharp a display look depends on two factors: the size of the screen and how far away you sit from it.
In our experience, you don’t really need more than 1,920 x 1,080 on a screen 14in or smaller. In fact, if you have 20/20 vision, you would have to be viewing the display at a distance closer than 56cm. Given that laptops with higher-resolution panels typically suffer a bit in the battery life department, it’s often worth opting for the lower resolution, and cheaper, option if you can.
The quality of a laptop’s display has little to do with the resolution of the screen, however. There’s no guarantee of a laptop’s maximum brightness, colour accuracy or contrast ratio no matter how sharp it is. We measure all these when testing each laptop because a dim, muddy or washed-out display can ruin a great product.
How many ports should a laptop have?
In addition to a power socket and headphone jack, most new laptops will come with at least one USB-C and a couple of USB-A ports. When it comes to connections, the general rule of thumb is the more the merrier.
It’s worth paying attention to the type of USB-C ports you’re getting, however; although they might look the same, they often have different capabilities from machine to machine. For the fastest transfer speeds, look for Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports; USB-C isn’t as quick.
And don’t assume every USB-C port on a laptop can carry video, power and data. Although the standard allows for this, manufacturers sometimes limit what each port can do.
It’s extremely useful to have a full-sized HDMI connector for hooking up the laptop to additional monitors, too, although these aren’t particularly common on slimmer laptops. And an SD card reader doesn’t hurt, either – an addition that’s sorely lacking on Apple’s laptops these days.
