This is fine most of the time, but not ideal. The use of an origami-style folding stand, as opposes to a hinged kick stand, means you can position the screen at a limited number of fixed angles – just four of them in total. It means that, when you've slipped the Galaxy Book out of its cover to use purely as a tablet, it has no stand, meaning it's less convenient than it might be for watching Netflix and Stan in bed or on flights. Rather than do the sensible thing and just ape the Surface Pro's design of a rear kickstand and a detachable keyboard, the way HP did, Samsung has opted for a folding keyboard cover that turns into a stand when you fold out the rear section of the cover. But you have to use the on-screen keyboard. This position is handy if you're using the pen, or on planes. Where the Galaxy Book most lets itself down though is the detachable keyboard. That said, the screen does seem very accurate (to our eyes on par with a MacBook Pro apart from the slight loss of shadow details) so it's certainly a very tempting device to use for serious design work. The High Dynamic Range (HDR) Super AMOLED screen, which really sets the Book apart from the Surface Pro and HP's brilliant Spectre x2, is terrific for watching movies on, and if you can ever find a source of HDR content that supports the Book (at the time of writing, Netflix doesn't recognise the Samsung as an HDR-capable machine), it could be the greatest portable video player you ever owned.īeing an AMOLED screen, it does tend to lose a little detail in shadows, which might not make it the ideal device for professional-grade Photoshop and graphic arts work, even though its pen, which supports 4096 pressure levels and has a tilt sensor that's supported by Photoshop, is one of the best digitisers we've ever used. One of the four positions you can fold the cover into. It's a pity, because the Galaxy Book has the makings of a great PC, especially when you consider how aggressively it's priced – the 12-inch model we reviewed is about $200 cheaper than the equivalent Microsoft Surface Pro, once you factor in the Pro's keyboard and pen – and with just a little more attention to detail Samsung could really be onto something. It's annoying enough that, before too long, you'll turn off the Flow notifications altogether. If you happen to be using Hangouts on the Book, you get an stream of duplicate notifications coming through from your phone. You can't, for instance, set Flow so it sends SMS notifications from your phone to your PC but not Google Hangouts notifications. Or this: the Galaxy Book has a feature called Samsung Flow, that lets you use certain Samsung phones in close collaboration with the Book, doing things like unlocking the Book using the fingerprint scanner on the phone, and having message notifications appear on your PC as well as your phone.īut you can't fine-tune the notifications. It doesn't appear to sync with the Android version of Samsung Notes, so fans of the Samsung Galaxy Note phone can't use the two devices in conjunction, as part of the one, seamless workflow.įor me, a huge fan of taking notes on the Galaxy Tab S3 and the Galaxy Note 5, that would have been a killer feature. But, much to our disappointment, the Windows version of Samsung Notes is a little buggy (it ate our notes for this review, and it's crash prone). Here's another detail: the Galaxy Book comes with a terribly nice pen, the same pen that comes with the wonderful Galaxy Tab S3, and you can use that pen to take quick handwritten notes using a Windows version of the Samsung Notes app. They're small things, to be sure (and in the case of the screen saver it is possible to turn it off), though they do sum up our experience with the Galaxy Book, which we think is a very appealing PC that lets itself down in the details. ![]() Samsung's Galaxy Book is a tablet wrapped in a keyboard case. Or, if you typed that into the Galaxy Book after a minute-long break, it would be "Wat? What?" This review, which I wrote using the Galaxy Book, would be littered with words missing their second letter had I not corrected them. After a mere 50 seconds of not using the Galaxy Book (or, to be precise, of not using its keyboard or trackpad), another whip-cracking feature will have already kicked in, in which the keyboard malfunctions ever so slightly, skipping the second letter you type as if it's waking from a nap and saying "What? What?" Not that you'd dare take a break of two whole minutes with this convertible Windows PC. One good thing about the cheesy, 3D screen saver that Samsung enables by default on its new Galaxy Book tablet-cum-laptop is that it practically forces you to keep working and never take a break longer than two minutes, lest the screen saver rear its ugly head and transport you right back to the 1990s, when laptops were all pretty horrible.
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