Samsung Series 9 ultrabook review 2012, Samsung has been distinguishing itself with a very tasty range of ultrabooks lately and the latest edition of the Series 9 is no exception, promising a gorgeous screen, a decent spec and one of the thinnest profiles out there.
Which is all well and good, but it will set you back about £1,200, which is a pretty penny for any ultrabook. It's what you'll pay for HP's fetchingly glass-topped Envy Spectre and a hundred more than you'll splash for a similarly specced Apple MacBook Air, for example.
Design
The original Series 9's brushed black metal livery has been upgraded to a bluish grey and very efficient and stylish it looks too, even with the less-than-subtle embossed "Samsung" logo on top. It's designed to be fingerprint resistant and this it certainly is - though that doesn't mean it can shrug off excessively oily mitt maulings.
The original Series 9's brushed black metal livery has been upgraded to a bluish grey and very efficient and stylish it looks too, even with the less-than-subtle embossed "Samsung" logo on top. It's designed to be fingerprint resistant and this it certainly is - though that doesn't mean it can shrug off excessively oily mitt maulings.
It feels exceptionally sturdy, despite the light weight, and Samsung puts this down to the casing being made largely from duralumin, a hi-tech material used in fighter planes, apparently.
It's a little slimmer and lighter than its predecessor, and indeed the MacBook Air, measuring just 13mm at its narrowest. It's a difference that's not easy to see, or to feel, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
On the sides are two USB ports (3.0 and 2.0), plus a combined mic-headphone jack, SD card reader and mini HDMI port. There are also mini Ethernet and VGA ports, which come with a dongle adaptor to keep the slim profile.
Inside, the good-sized backlit keys are nicely spaced and sit just proud of the casing. They're sensitive and offer enough travel for comfortable typing without slowing you down.
The mousepad supports multi-digit commands but could be a bit temperamental when identifying presses on the left and right buttons, which aren't marked, resulting in more than a few missed presses.
Performance
The 13.3-inch screen looks lovely indeed with its resolution of 1600x900 pixels and excels in terms of brightness and sharpness. Detail looks beautifully crisp and colours deliciously vibrant -- even better, it has a wide viewing angle so sharing isn't a problem.
The 13.3-inch screen looks lovely indeed with its resolution of 1600x900 pixels and excels in terms of brightness and sharpness. Detail looks beautifully crisp and colours deliciously vibrant -- even better, it has a wide viewing angle so sharing isn't a problem.
It's carrying a 128GB solid state drive, which is what you'd normally accept in this price range (though the Asus Zenbook manages to include 256GB for about the same price).
Under the hood it's powered by a 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5-2467M processor backed by 4GB of RAM and Intel's HD 3000 graphics chip -- not a bad set-up really. It delivered a PCMark performance benchmark rating of 2,263, which puts it behind the Asus Zenbook but comfortably in front of its Series 5 little brother. It took a relatively tardy nine minutes and ten seconds to encode our test 11-minute movie for iTunes, but for gaming (on Portal, using default settings) it delivered some impressive frame rates hovering around the 130-140fps mark.
The battery however disappointed, perhaps due to the demands of that impressive screen, calling it a day after a little under three hours.
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