Samsung Series 9 900X3A laptop

Review Samsung’s Series 9 is the Korean giant’s thin and light flagship, and one of several recent models to come to market that borrow engineering and design principles from Apple’s Air range. Which means decent performance, decent components, but minimal expansion.

Slim and stylish: Samsung's Series 9

This machine has a price tag to match the Air, but fortunately, turns out to be an extremely well-engineered laptop with none of the usual rough edges. Just sharp ones, as we’ll see. So what does £1,099 buy you? Surprisingly, quite a lot – but this is emphatically not a machine with expansion in mind.

There are four ports: mini-Ethernet, mini-HDMI, a USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0, plus a microSD card slot. If you’re using regular HDMI, Ethernet and SD cards that’s a lot of dongles to carry around with you and (potentially) lose. Samsung seems pretty coy about this on the website.

The casing is entirely aluminium, sculpted into a wave, which is quite striking. If you can get used to the sharp edges, this is a comfortable machine to carry, particularly since it weighs in at 1.3kg and is 16mm at its thickest.

Ports are tucked away behind a flap

Visually, the Series 9 has one of the very best displays in its class, a 13.3in SuperBright Plus LED for which Samsung claims 400 nits. It's touted as a matt screen, which I suppose it is, relatively speaking - being much less glossy than the norm.