Samsung proved it could be taken seriously as a laptop manufacturer with the release of the Galaxy Book Pro and Galaxy Book Pro 360 earlier this year. We found both laptops impressive, particularly the latter, which we awarded with 4 out of 5 stars in our Samsung Galaxy Pro 360 review.
Given how well-received Samsung’s latest laptops were — not to mention the amount of money and energy the company invested in shipping ultraportables in 2021 — it’s no surprise that the Korean manufacturer is poised to release successors to those laptops in 2022 in a bid to make our best laptop list.
That's what we're hearing this week courtesy of SamMobile, which claims to have obtained exclusive information about the upcoming Galaxy Book Pro series laptops. According to the site, Samsung will release the Galaxy Book 2 Pro and the Galaxy Book 2 Pro 360 in the first quarter of 2022.
The company plans to continue using OLED screens for these next-generation Windows laptops, and though the site didn’t obtain information about the machines’ specifications, it believes the laptops will use Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake or AMD’s Zen 4-based Ryzen 6000 series processors. We think this is a reasonable assessment, as is the expectation of improved graphics performance in higher-end configurations and better battery life.
Both laptops should have the same tight integration with Samsung’s tablets and phones seen in the current models. And that's a big deal.
As we said earlier this year, Samsung’s Galaxy Book Pro is poised to shake up laptops — including MacBooks because of how the company tightly integrates its laptops with its Galaxy smartphones, and Android devices in general. Having the option to connect your laptop to your Android smartphone to run phone apps on your desktop, take calls and easily access your photos, messages and notifications is a great and useful feature. We see no reason the new Samsung models wouldn’t also come with this functionality.
We’re also happy about the claim that Samsung will keep the OLED screens from the current Galaxy Book Pro models. As we said in our Galaxy Book Pro 360 review, the display’s colors look vibrant and fine details stand out while watching videos and movies on the device. We’re unsure if the new laptops will have 4K displays (the current generation of laptops do not), but the upgrade would be welcome — especially on higher-end configurations. 4K OLED screens would go a long way in helping Samsung build a bigger presence in the U.S. laptop market.
The reported release date — sometime during the first three months of 2022 —seems somewhat far-fetched. Though it might be tempting to think we’ll get an official announcement during CES 2022 in January, we haven’t heard any industry chatter about these laptops until now. That's unusual, given that specs and other details about hardware coming in a month's time would be leaking by now.
We don’t want to completely rule out a Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro announcement next month — but we won’t bet on it either.
