Finger friendly
Keyboard and touchpad reflect the considered design. The touchpad is a one piece affair, but one of the best I’ve tried and is clearly delineated for right clicks.
One of the better all-one-one PC trackpads around
Samsung bundles a Pontipine-House full of little apps – these are frowned upon by grown-ups but Samsung’s selection is generally quite helpful: including Easy Content Share; File Share (the former is for P2P access for users on your LAN), Network Manager, and SpeedUP Manager. Experienced users will probably have their own tools for the job.
Makes the right impression
Verdict
This is a machine very much for the professional show-off to be seen with – a salesman or a designer. If you’re not in this group, you still might appreciate the power and weight combination on offer here. I was extremely sceptical of the Series 9 concept to begin with, as I am wary of all “look-at-me!” designs. But by the end of the review period, it made perfect sense. It's a nice machine to use. ®
More Notebook Reviews |
||||
 Asus
Zenbook UX31E |
 Acer
TravelMate Timeline X TM8481T |
 Dell
XPS 14z |
 Acer
Aspire S3 Ultrabook |
 Lenovo
ThinkPad X1 |
Samsung Series 9 900X3A laptop
COMMENTS
Nice rant...
Except:
USB3 = Ubiquitous and backwards compatible, cheap peripherals
Thunderbolt = Rare, expensive peripherals.
Your magic do it all on one thunderbolt and lightening box will sadly come with a very very frightening price tag because of all the output chips needed, docking stations have never been cheap and as a result not many people own one.
Ideally of course you'd have both USB3 and Thunderbolt, but where do you draw the line, why not add Firewire, Serial, Parallel, Fibre Channel, eSATA, SAS, SCSI? The answer is because in a very tiny/slim/stylish system design choices have to be carefully balanced, compromises made, and to most of the general population a USB3 port is vastly more useful. Strange as it may seem to you most laptops are not bought by power users like us... there is a whole world full of lesser folk out there, and they like the shiny shiny too!
Re: Lets see...
"Clone in almost every respect to an air, including the price."
Not quite. The air has a faster processor (1.7 GHz vs 1.6 GHz Core i5) and a superior screen (1440x900 vs 1366 x 768 native resolution).
Really puts into perspective the "Apple is overpriced" nonsense so prevalent on this and other boards.
Samsung are late to the party and offer a product that is not as good value for money. So, par for the course then!
I love this Samsung laptop. I never ever booted the preinstalled Windows on it, but went for Ubuntu right away. Never before had a laptop that would boot up to the login screen in less than 10 seconds (takes about 8 sec from power on, and I don't mean a resume, but a real power on). I don't do much graphics, but for what I do it's super fast.
The things I like most about it:
- the display is so bright (and matte), it is easily useable in bright daylight and even sunlight (ok, resolution could be better...)
- the keyboard is awesome for a device that size. I really type a lot, and the keyboard is superb.
- it's fast, and it's silent. the fan is rarely noticeable at all (and I have seen other laptops running Linux that sound like a vacuum cleaner on an idle system - and even worse for Windows)
What's a bit annoying is that you need those dongles if you want to connect VGA or RJ45. But I bought a port replicator connected through USB, which connects all my devices. It even supports VGA over USB, which I haven't tried yet (hope I get it working for Linux as well).
Why oh pedant?
Unless there are some bizarre 5ghz only 802.11n implementations then n is a perfectly good synonym for b/g/n.
A more valid moan would be what bandwidth of n it supports. Ie 300mb/s or the lesser versions.
Get your facts straight
Thunderbolt can deliver 10W of power, more than double that of USB 3 and 4 times that of USB 2. Not that you'd likely carry a desktop port replicator around with you anyway (the point of it being to provide a single cable docking solution) but there's no reason you couldn't do all that USB 3 can and more with it. It's not even mutually exclusive, there's nothing stopping manufacturers putting both types of port on a laptop or PC.
