The Notebook 9 Pen is a greatest hits tour of Samsung’s best laptop features. It’s slim, powerful and includes a generous list of extra features, from fingerprint and facial recognition security to a collection of ports often left out of similar laptops. Most notably, it also includes Samsung’s own S Pen stylus, which is almost exactly the same one found in the Galaxy Note 8 phone, making this yet another way phones and laptops are starting to cross-pollinate.
The way the Notebook 9 Pen works with the S Pen stylus is going to feel familiar to Galaxy Note users, which you can take as an endorsement, considering how much we liked the Note 8.
Then stylus fits into a discreet slot on the front edge of the system, and clicking in on the top of the S Pen pops it out of its home. When that happens, a contextual onscreen menu launches for easy access to Samsung’s inking apps. These phone-based apps actually work great on a laptop. There’s a note-taking app, a screen-writing app and Smart select, which acts as a kind of smart screen grab, pulling in web page content, and even making short animated GIFs from videos.
