If the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus doesn’t make a compelling case Companies will take a closer look at Chromebooksthen we are not sure what will happen. From £649 to £749 (or £549 on recent sales) you’ll get a stunning thin laptop with a beautiful OLED screen. It is a fast, cost-effective, efficient and easy-to-manage solution for small and large businesses. Google’s Gemini AI integration into Chrome OS is successful and arguably more useful than some of Microsoft’s flashier solutions. Co-pilot+ functions. While compromises have been made to hit the price point, this is a great laptop for the money, putting similarly priced Windows business laptops to shame. None of this means that the Galaxy Chromebook Plus will tick all the boxes and suit every use case, but this thing is an absolute bargain.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus Review: Design
While other manufacturers think it’s “affordable” or a “Chromebook” and immediately go for a chunky, plastic-heavy design, Samsung has brought its A-game to the Galaxy Chromebook Plus. This is an ultra-thin premium all-aluminum laptop. Galaxy Book models. Although it measures 355.4 x 225.8mm to fit a 15.6-inch screen, it is just under 12mm thick, making it incredibly lightweight at 1.17kg. We found it too easy to wander around the house with it in one hand, and this device is easy to carry around all day in a bag or backpack.
However, Samsung hasn’t skimped on the build. The lid has some flex, but the rest of the laptop feels very solid, with no sharp edges or rough seams found on some cheaper aluminum laptops.
Moreover, Samsung achieved this without giving up all the standard ports and connectors. You can still find two USB Type-C ports on the left side, as well as an HDMI output, while on the right is a USB Type-C port and a MicroSD card slot. You don’t have super-fast USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, USB 4, or Thunderbolt 4 ports, but that’s not a problem for PCs. Chromebook where there is less demand for high-speed storage. WITH WiFi 6E and built-in Bluetooth 5.3, you’re already well set up for wireless networking, mice and headsets.
A mouse won’t be an absolute necessity, as the touchpad is large, smooth, and generally very accurate in tracking. Measuring 13 x 8.8 cm, it fits well with the large 15.6-inch screen and doesn’t take up too much space under the keyboard. We sometimes found that it missed two-finger swipe gestures, which was a bit annoying, but the problem seemed to go away with extended use.
What’s more, we preferred the Galaxy Chromebook Plus’s keyboard to Samsung’s efforts in the premium segment. Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360. The palm rests have more room to support your left hand, and the feel combines a light touch with decent haptic feedback, making it very easy to achieve decent typing speeds. We have few complaints about the layout, despite the small cursors and unusually thin numeric keypad.
The most controversial changes here will be the replacement of the old Chrome OS launch key with a new shortcut key, with the launcher now tied to the G logo key on the bottom row. Quick Insert is Google’s latest attempt to make Gemini a core part of ChromeOS. Clicking it opens a menu of context-sensitive suggestions and search results, as well as quick access to emoji or GIFs you might want to add to your document or message, as well as Gemini’s “Help Me Write” feature when used in relevant applications.
It’s quite clever and seems designed to make Gemini useful and save time, rather than a gimmick you might not use. The more you use Quick Insert, the more it starts to creep into your daily workflows, which is certainly part of the point.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus review: display
The Galaxy Chromebook Plus is superior to any previous Chromebook with an OLED screen. That doesn’t necessarily make it the best Chromebook screen ever – its brightness and resolution are lower than the QHD IPS display on a Chromebook. Asus ExpertBook CX54 — but it’s a big improvement over any other modern Chromebook at this price point. It’s exceptionally bright, has tons of contrast, and makes black and white look perfectly black or white.
As for color reproduction, it’s good enough for serious creative work, covering 100% of the sRGB color gamut, 92.3% of Adobe RGB and 98.5% of the DCI-P3 color gamut. Brightness isn’t impressive at 393.9 cd/m2, but it’s sufficient for most indoor use scenarios. Color accuracy isn’t flawless, with an average Delta E of 2.95, but we’re still talking about levels at which most people can’t tell the difference.
The only major complaint you can make is that the 1920 x 1080 resolution isn’t high enough for a 15.6-inch screen. Well, it’s true that you can see the pixel structure, and you’ll have to go beyond the native resolution in Chrome OS’s display settings and text size to make the most of your screen real estate. However, if you can live with the loss of image clarity, it’s a price worth paying – and let’s not forget we’re talking about a device that costs between £650 and £750.
Samsung has included a 1080p webcam, and it captures good, well-balanced video in natural light. It doesn’t perform as well in artificial light, producing a grainy look and less natural colors, but it’s still very useful for daytime video conferencing. Meanwhile, the sound is better in clarity than in tone. You can hear speech clearly, and the audio on video is bright and clear, but there’s very little warmth or bass, and it’s hard to listen to at high volumes.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus Review: Performance
The cheapest devices in the range use a low-end Intel Core 3-100U processor, but our £749 review model upgrades this to a Core 5-120U. This is an energy-efficient 10-core processor with two Performance cores and eight Efficient cores, running in 12 threads at up to 5 GHz. It is paired with 8GB of RAM.
Our tests result in the fastest Chromebook we’ve ever tested, with Geekbench 6 scores of 2,072 (single-core) and 7,608 (multi-core), putting it just ahead of the mighty Asus Expert Book CX54. In the Jetstream multi-threaded performance test, it scored 275.9 to the Asus’s 264.6, and the only test where it falls short is the 3D Mark Wildlife Unlimited test, where it scored between 9873 and 10242. Here is the Asus Core Ultra 7 with a superior processor Intel Arc GPU has an advantage.
The Samsung never feels anything less than snappy in day-to-day use, even when the browser has multiple apps open and a dozen or more tabs running. When you use Gemini AI features, there is virtually no delay in waiting for results. However, some of the most demanding local Linux or Android apps may be speed-limited by Samsung’s storage choice, as it features lower-cost eUFS flash storage rather than high-performance NVMe. solid state drive. We don’t have ChromeOS storage benchmarks to quantify the difference, however, and it has to be said that we didn’t notice any issues when running regular performance web apps.
The Galaxy Chromebook Plus also wins on battery life, delivering 11 hours 56 minutes of HD video playback with the screen set to 170 cd/m2, while the Asus lasted 10 hours 39 minutes. Any one of them will easily help you get through a typical workday.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus review: Is it worth it?
Yes. The ExpertBook CX54 is still the best Chromebook money can buy, thanks to its superior all-around specs and higher-resolution screen, but the Galaxy Chromebook Plus beats it in some respects and doesn’t feel noticeably inferior in others. And while you have all the usual scenarios in which Chrome OS devices are inferior to more traditional laptops—especially for high-end creative work, design, or video work where app selection is limited—there are still many support and performance scenarios in which Chromebooks also can work in every way, if not more effectively. If this can work for your organization, the Galaxy Chromebook Plus may be an ideal and affordable device to review.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus Specifications
| Display | 15.6-inch AMOLED display with 1920 x 1080 resolution and 60Hz refresh rate. | Row 0 – cell 2 |
| CPU | Intel Core 5 120U, 1.4 to 5 GHz | Row 1 – Cell 2 |
| GPU | Intel Graphics | Row 2 – Cell 2. |
| RAM | 8 GB LPDDR5 | Row 3 – Cell 2. |
| Ports | 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C, USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, HDMI 2.0, MicroSD card reader, 3.5mm audio jack | Row 4 – Cell 2. |
| Storage | 256 GB eUFS | Line 5 – Cell 2. |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), Bluetooth v5.3 | Line 6 – Cell 2. |
| Weight | 1.17 kg | Line 7 – Cell 2. |
| Dimensions | 355.4 x 225.8 x 11.8 mm | Line 8 – Cell 2. |
| Battery capacity | 68Wh | Line 9 – Cell 2 |
| operating system | Chrome OS | Row 10 – Cell 2 |
| Line 11 – cell 0 | Line 11 – Cell 1 | Row 11 – Cell 2 |