Above: Samsung’s 13.3 inch Galaxy Book 360. Photos courtesy Samsung.

This morning, Samsung launched a laptop lineup with an emphasis on lifestyle use rather than a business focus.
“Why can’t a laptop be more like a smartphone,” one of the many presenters asked.

The immediate answer would probably be that you can’t put it into a pocket or small handbag, but Samsung’s answer emphasised convenience and style along with a refreshed focus on synchronicity between its smartphones and its computing line.

“We’re bringing what people love most their smartphones to their computers,” said Stephanie Choi.
On the surface, that’s certainly true. The new Galaxy Book series is built out of tastefully anodized aluminium in a range of colours and taps into Intel’s effort to meet the performance advantage of Apple’s new M1 chip, the Evo reference designs for slimmer, performance-driven PC laptops.

Evo leverages 11th generation Intel Core chips, chiefly the i7, but also including the i5 and i3 on the lower end.
Intel will be supporting Evo compatible systems with a co-marketing advertising campaign that is meant to raise the profile of the new hardware designs and Samsung is taking a lead role in that process.

The new Galaxy Book series break out as the US$999 baseline Galaxy Book, the US$1,199 Galaxy Book 360, which features a screen that folds completely backward making a touchscreen tablet out of the device and the Galaxy Book Odyssey starting at US$1399, a higher performance system featuring a discrete Nvidia RTX GPU and up to 32GB RAM.

The 360 model leverages the microhinge design that Samsung introduced for its Galaxy Fold smartphone and is compatible with the company’s SPen technology, with a new, full-sized stylus available for the new touchscreen laptop.

Each of the slimline devices is available in 13.3 inch and 15.6 inch sizes with Dolby Atmos surround sound speakers, active noise cancelling and a Thunderbolt 4 port in their connectivity lineup.

Samsung and Microsoft are deepening their partnership to drive integration between smartphone and PC deeper into the Samsung ecosystem and by extension, setting the stage for more effective synchronisation between Android and Windows 10 PCs.

There is a big emphasis on data sharing and synchronisation between smartphone and PC and the new Galaxy Book laptops even come with their own version of SmartSwitch, a tremendously useful app developed for their smartphones which makes moving data and software from one smartphone to another easy.

Samsung expects to bring that process to the rather more cluttered and complex world of PC migrations with a version of Smartswitch for its new PCs.

Samsung might be a bit hasty in doing an ad spot about “The museum of old PCs” though. The new Galaxy Book series may be a step forward in the evolution of laptop PC development, but there’s no mistaking the similarity in some of these announcements to those offered up by its competitor in style, Apple, which has made many of these features cornerstones of not just its laptops, but its entire ecosystem.

To answer Samsung’s own question, a laptop isn’t ever really going to be like a smartphone, but it can be better. On the surface of these new announcements, the Galaxy Book is better. But other PC manufacturers are going to be bringing their own special sauce to the Evo design specification.

Samsung’s specifications