Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus review
If the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus doesn’t make a convincing argument for businesses to look at Chromebooks, then we’re not sure what will. £649 to £749 – or £549 in recent sales – nets you a stunning slimline laptop with a lovely OLED screen. It’s fast, lean, efficient, and easy to manage for small businesses or larger enterprises. The integration of Google’s Gemini AI into Chrome OS is coming on nicely and is arguably more useful than some of Microsoft’s more flashy Copilot+ features. While there have been compromises made to hit the price point, this is a remarkable laptop for the money, putting similarly-priced Windows business laptops to shame. None of the above means the Galaxy Chromebook Plus will meet every requirement or match every use case, but this thing is an absolute bargain.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus review: Design
Where other manufacturers think ‘affordable’ or ‘Chromebook’ and reach straight for a chunky, plastics-heavy build, Samsung has brought its A-game to the Galaxy Chromebook Plus. This is an ultra-slim, all-aluminum laptop in the mold of its premium Galaxy Book models. While it has a 355.4mm x 225.8mm footprint to fit in the 15.6in screen, it’s a fraction under 12mm thick, making for an improbably light 1.17kg weight. We found it a little too easy to wander around the house with it clutched single-handed, and it’s an easy device to carry all day long in a bag or backpack.
Yet Samsung hasn’t gone cheap on the build. There’s some small flex in the lid, but the rest of the laptop feels extremely solid, with none of the sharp edges or rough seams you’ll find on some cheaper aluminum laptops.
What’s more, Samsung has achieved this without ditching all the standard ports and sockets. You can still find two USB Type-C ports on the left-hand side, along with an HDMI output, while there’s a USB Type-C port and a MicroSD card slot on the right. You don’t get any super-fast USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, USB 4, or Thunderbolt 4 ports, but that’s less of an issue on a Chromebook where there’s less demand for high-speed storage. With Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 onboard, you’re already well set up for wireless networking, mice, and headsets.
A mouse won’t be an absolute necessity, because the touchpad is big, smooth, and mostly very accurate in its tracking. At 13 x 8.8cm, it’s a good match for the larger 15.6in screen, without occupying too much real estate below the keyboard deck. We occasionally found it missed two-fingered scrolling gestures, which was slightly annoying, but the problem seemed to disappear with long-term use.
What’s more, we preferred the Galaxy Chromebook Plus’s keyboard to Samsung’s effort in the premium Galaxy Book 5 Pro 360. There’s more space on the palm rests to support the left hand, and the feel balances a light touch with decent tactile feedback, making it very easy to hit a decent typing speed. We have few grumbles with the layout, despite small cursors and an unusually slim numeric keypad.
The most controversial changes here will be the replacement of the old Chrome OS Launcher key with a new Quick Insert key, with the launcher now tied into a G logo key on the bottom row. The Quick Insert is Google’s latest attempt to make Gemini a core part of ChromeOS. Hitting it launches a menu of context-sensitive suggestions and search results, plus quick access to Emojis or GIFs you might want to add to your document or message, and Gemini’s Help me Write feature when used in relevant apps.
It’s fairly smart and seems dedicated to making Gemini useful and time-saving, rather than a gimmick that you might not use. The more you use Quick Insert, the more it starts to sneak itself into your everyday workflows, which is surely part of the point.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus review: Display
The Galaxy Chromebook Plus goes one better than any previous Chromebook by fitting an OLED screen. This doesn’t necessarily make it the best Chromebook screen ever – it’s lower in brightness and resolution than the QHD IPS display on the Asus ExpertBook CX54 – but it’s a big improvement on any other current Chromebook at this price point. It’s exceptionally vibrant, there are heaps of contrasts, and blacks and whites look perfectly black or white.
In terms of color performance, it’s good enough for serious creative work, covering 100% of the sRGB color gamut, 92.3% of Adobe RGB, and 98.5% of DCI-P3. Brightness isn’t spectacular at 393.9cd/m2, but it’s bright enough for most indoor scenarios. Color accuracy isn’t flawless, with an average Delta E of 2.95, but we’re still talking about levels where most human beings couldn’t tell the difference.
The only serious complaint you can make against it is that the 1,920 x 1,080 resolution isn’t really high enough for a 15.6in screen. Well, it’s true that you can see the pixel structure, and that you’ll need to go beyond the native resolution in Chrome OS’s Display and text size settings to make the most of the screen real estate. However, if you can live with the loss of pin-sharp clarity, it’s a price that’s worth paying – and let’s not forget that we’re talking about a £650 to £750 device.
Samsung has fitted a 1080p webcam, and with natural light to work with it captures good, well-balanced video. In artificial light it’s not so good, giving a grainy appearance with less natural colors, but it’s still very usable for video meetings after daylight hours. The audio, meanwhile, does better on clarity than tone. You can hear speech clearly and the sound on video is bright and crisp, but there’s very little warmth or bottom end, and it’s hard to listen to at higher volumes.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus review: Performance
The cheapest devices in the range use Intel’s low-end Core 3-100U processor, but our £749 review model swaps that out for the Core 5-120U. This is an energy-efficient 10-core processor with two Performance cores and eight Efficient cores, running 12 threads at speeds of up to 5GHz. It’s paired with 8GB of RAM.
The result across our benchmarks is the fastest Chromebook we’ve yet tested, with Geekbench 6 scores of 2072 (single-core) and 7608 (multi-core) that put it just ahead of the mighty Asus Expertbook CX54. In the Jetstream multi-threaded performance benchmark it scores 275.9 to the Asus’s 264.6, and the only test where it falls behind is in the 3D Mark Wildlife Unlimited test, where it scores 9873 to 10242. Here the Asus’s Core Ultra 7 with its superior Intel Arc GPU has the advantage.
The Samsung never feels anything less than snappy in everyday use, even with multiple apps open and a dozen or more tabs running in the browser. When you do make use of the Gemini AI features, there’s precious little delay while you wait for results. However, some of the most demanding local Linux or Android apps could be speed-limited by Samsung’s choice of storage, as it has fitted cheaper eUFS flash storage rather than a high-performance NVMe SSD. We don’t have ChromeOS storage benchmarks to quantify the difference, though, and it must be said that we noticed no issues while running the usual Web-based productivity apps.
The Galaxy Chromebook Plus also wins on battery life, making it through 11 hours and 56 minutes of HD video playback with the screen set to 170cd/m2, where the Asus puttered out at 10 hours 39 minutes. Either will easily get you through a normal working day.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus review: Is it worth it?
Yes. The ExpertBook CX54 is still the best Chromebook money can buy, thanks to a superior all-around spec and higher-resolution screen, but the Galaxy Chromebook Plus beats it in some regards and doesn’t feel markedly inferior in the rest. And while you have all the usual scenarios where Chrome OS devices come second best to more traditional laptops – especially for high-end creative, design, or video work, where the app selection is limited – there are still many support and productivity scenarios where Chromebooks can work every bit as well, if not more efficiently. If that might work in your organization, the Galaxy Chromebook Plus might be the perfect, affordable device to find out with.
Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus specifications
| Display | 15.6-inch 1,920 x 1,080 AMOLED, 60Hz refresh rate | Row 0 – Cell 2 |
| Processor | Intel Core 5 120U, 1.4GHz to 5GHz | Row 1 – Cell 2 |
| GPU | Intel Graphics | Row 2 – Cell 2 |
| RAM | 8GB 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 | 256GB eUFS | Row 5 – Cell 2 |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), Bluetooth v5.3 | Row 6 – Cell 2 |
| Weight | 1.17Kg | Row 7 – Cell 2 |
| Dimensions | 355.4 x 225.8 x 11.8mm | Row 8 – Cell 2 |
| Battery Capacity | 68Wh | Row 9 – Cell 2 |
| Operating System | Chrome OS | Row 10 – Cell 2 |
| Row 11 – Cell 0 | Row 11 – Cell 1 | Row 11 – Cell 2 |
Source link
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25777573/STKE002_CES2025_A.jpg)
