On the plus side, things do at least feel reasonably peppy in regular use, and onboard AI features didn’t disappoint. Live Captions (in the same language only for now, until the Copilot+ PC rollout hits) were snappy and accurate, and Paint’s Image Creator mode offered up AI art quickly on command. But best of all, Samsung has finally come through by releasing a laptop that really, honest-to-God offers “all-day battery life.” Its benchmark of 18 hours, 43 minutes on a full-screen YouTube playback test is a high-water mark for Intel PCs, and enough to even best every Snapdragon laptop I’ve tested except for one—the Asus ProArt PZ13.
Buggy Book
Despite some high points, I found myself frequently frustrated with the user experience when working with this laptop. I’ve already mentioned the aggravating keyboard, but compounding that problem is the fact that the system is just plain buggy.
Photograph: Christopher Null
I lost count of how many times the laptop would fail to do something completely pedestrian, like loading the Samsung account login screen, closing a window, or even loading Copilot by tapping the Copilot key on the keyboard. My review unit even locked up during login once and refused to run a System Restore repeatedly until I ran the “Fix problems using Windows Update” recovery wizard. Oddly, the system ran fine during stress-test benchmarks but it struggled the most when it should have been smooth sailing.
Samsung also makes a lot of hay about the new AI features available on the system, including “Transcript Assist” for converting recorded meetings into written summaries and “Chat Assist,” which can “enhance conversations through suggested replies.” You’ll have to read the fine print to realize these are all features on Samsung Galaxy phones, and that you can only use them via your phone and Microsoft Phone Link—essentially turning the Book5 into nothing but an oversized phone display.
The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 has a pretty face and jaw-dropping battery life, but it’s nearly impossible to recommend in its current state due to general instability and an unfriendly keyboard, especially at $1,700. Firmware and software updates may help to resolve the former, but there’s not much to be done about the input situation other than to price out an external keyboard.
