A serious workhorse? Samsung packs quite a punch in a sleek package

Over the years, Samsung’s Galaxy Book laptops have gone from focusing on deep integration with Samsung’s Galaxy device ecosystem to delivering capable Windows laptops that are creator- and performance-focused enough to woo those that might have otherwise chosen a MacBook Pro. The Galaxy Book6 Ultra is positioned at the top of that lineup, but is the combination of performance, display and battery life worth the pretty penny?

There’s an almost understated sense of minimalism in the design of the Book6 Ultra, with a solid all-metal exterior, a gunmetal chassis and a contrasting black keyboard and none of the flashy gamer aesthetics that might stand out (to its detriment) in a boardroom. It’s available in just one standard-issue colour – grey. Despite its large 16-inch display and dedicated graphics, the Ultra maintains an impressively slim profile (15.4mm) and weight (1.89kg), and there’s no flex under pressure. Connectivity is good too, with two Thunderbolt 4 ports and 8K/60fps-ready HDMI 2.1 port on the left, and a legacy USB-A, 3.5mm audio and a full-sized SD card slot on the right (there’s Wi-FI 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 for those who loathe wires).

Flip it open, and Samsung’s display expertise is evident, with the 2880x1800-pixel, AMOLED touch panel delivering downright stunning visuals, and the dynamic refresh rate (30-120Hz) and anti-reflective coating make it among the most versatile laptop displays around. With strong coverage on sRGB, DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB colour spaces, the laptop is well-suited for tasks like photo editing, video work, and content creation, and it’s equally at home running a PowerPoint slide show or playing back streaming media with all of that pin-sharp detail and deep blacks. Worth mentioning are the Book6 Ultra’s speakers – the two upwards-firing speakers plus four force-cancelling woofers produce crisp, full and rich audio that’s an absolute shocker for a laptop this slim. The webcam is…serviceable, a 2MP 1080p model, though if you have a Samsung smartphone handy, you can use its camera as a webcam too…for likely far better results. Elsewhere, the keyboard is a bit too shallow for my tastes, although it does include a fingerprint scanner for authentication. The trackpad, on the other hand, is just sublime – smooth, highly responsive and precise, and large enough to be super useful in creative apps – and it easily rivals the best trackpads on the market.

Where things get interesting is the choice of hardware this ultrabook is packing – the latest Pather Lake Intel Core Ultra 7 356H, paired with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a fast 1TB NVMe SSD. On graphics, Samsung has gone to town with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 laptop GPU, which lets the sleek boardroom player transform into a legitimate gaming laptop once you get home. Or for the creatively inclined, be used for graphically intensive workloads, such as ultra-high-definition video editing or 3D animation on that gorgeous OLED screen. I put it to the task, editing 4K videos in Adobe Premiere for a work project and pushing Cyberpunk 2077 to nearly 110 frames per second at full-HD and High graphics. It may not be an Alienware or an Asus RoG/TUF gaming laptop, but it isn’t a pushover by any means either. All this while staying cool and quiet, courtesy the vapour chamber and redesigned cooling fans. And the best bit is that battery life, often a bugbear even on premium Windows laptops, is pretty good for a laptop with a dedicated graphics card, and getting all-day battery life on regular workloads is easy. 

Of course, one of the big reasons to consider the Book6 Ultra is how well it can work with Samsung devices, not unlike the ecosystem benefits of owning a Mac along with an iPhone/iPad. For instance, you can use your trackpad and keyboard on the connected Galaxy smartphone and share files and clipboard contents rather easily. Got a Samsung tablet handy? It’ll double up as a second display for the laptop. Kudos to Samsung for making these interactions seamless, across the hotchpotch of platforms that make up this entire experience (Android, Windows, Intel).

That said, this is not an idle purchase. As with the MacBook Pro, this is best reserved for someone who can write this off as a business expense, someone who wants serious muscle in a portable form factor. It certainly isn’t cheap, but it’s a strong offering for the big bucks it commands.

Rating: 9/10

Price: ₹3,10,990

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