Samsung, a welcome return to the laptop business

Noel Campion is impressed with the ultra light, portable, and thrifty Galaxy Book Ion

Samsung Galaxy Book Ion has a slender design and is ultra portable.

Samsung has been out of the laptop game for a while now, but thankfully, they’re back. I’ve been testing the Galaxy Book Ion for the last few weeks which comes in a 13.3-inch or 15.6-inch display variants.

Design

The Ion has a really nice slender design with a modern look and premium materials. The base has four rubber feet and a grille to vent air from the fan which sounds quiet, even under load. Despite its petite size, it does feel rigid although the lid can flex, which isn’t too surprising considering how thin it is.

Specifications

My review unit is the smaller 13.3-inch ultraportable which weighs a mere 970g. It came to me configured with 8GB of RAM, 10th gen Intel i5-10210U CPU @ 1.6GHz and turbo boost up to 2.11GHz. It also came with 512GB of NVMe SSD storage and a microSD card tray slot. The latter requires that you remove the tray like you would with a mobile phone using a SIM ejector tool. Not sure why this isn’t just an open slot and I would prefer to see a full-size SD card slot but it did come in handy for things like cards from my drone and dash cam. There are no Windows Hello camera features but you do get a large fingerprint sensor for secure logins.

Display

I’ve used and reviewed a lot of laptops but very few have a display as nice as the one found on the Ion. The FHD QLED Cinematic display is a real stunner with a respectable resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels and an aspect ratio of 16:9. This is ideal for watching widescreen movies but not as good for productivity. That being said, the colour accuracy is excellent and I found it superb for photo editing in apps like Lightroom and PhotoShop.

In general, when I work indoors with controlled lighting, I like screen brightness at around 60% unless I’m watching videos. When outdoors, you need maximum brightness and the Ion has a dedicated outdoor mode that can hit a max brightness of 600 nits. It even has a shortcut to this feature by pressing the Fn + F10 keys.

There are small bezels either side of the display and then a slightly bigger one on top which houses the decent 720p webcam. The bottom Bezels are twice the height of the top which spoils the overall look a little. The only thing that I missed on the screen was touch input but this isn’t a dealbreaker, for me at least.

Ports and connectivity

The Ion has a good selection of ports including a barrel type power connection on the left, full-size HDMI, Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port (can also be used for charging) and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the right side are a pair of USB 3.0 Gen 1 Type-A ports and the aforementioned UFS microSD tray. You also get Bluetooth and wifi 6 (Gig+), 802.11 ax 2×2.

Keyboard and trackpad

The keyboard has backlighting with three brightness levels and off. The keys are good, but not fantastic and it took me a while to get comfortable typing on it. I found the keys a little too close together and I was hitting keys in error far too easily.

The trackpad is responsive and nice to use but it also hides a feature I’ve never seen on any other laptop. When you press Fn + F11 essentially, the trackpad converts into a wireless charging pad. Of course, you can’t use the trackpad when this is enabled but you can use an external mouse instead. This is a genuinely useful feature that does come in handy to top up a phone, watch or headphones.

Performance

Overall, performance is excellent on the Ion, especially the NVMe SSD, where I recorded read speeds of 3,438 mb/s and impressive write speeds of 2,996 mb/s. However, only light gaming is possible using the Intel onboard graphics.

Battery life is exceptional. Streaming The Irishman on Netflix (3hrs), the battery went from 100% to 78%. In general use, it really is an all-day laptop and one of the best I’ve used for battery performance.

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Book Ion is ultra-light, ultra-portable and incredibly thrifty on battery power all in an attractive form factor. Unlike any ultrabook I’ve ever tested, the Ion has a free DDR4 RAM slot and even a spare M.2 slot for extra memory and storage upgrades. The only minor downsides are the typing experience and quiet external speakers.

Price

The Samsung Galaxy Book Ion 13.3 inch €1,450 and 15.6-inch a €1,500. Both sizes will range in a stunning Aura Silver colour.