Samsung Series 9 laptop review

Samsung's new laptop is the most beautiful ultrabook on the market - users pay for it in cash and battery life, but many will still want to says Matt Warman 

A new generation of laptops is coming rapidly to shops and the charge is being led by Asus, Samsung and Samsung. That’s because the latest Samsung Series 9’s main real rival is the old Samsung Series 9.

Although only the new model, the NP900X3B, fulfills the technical criteria to be an ultrabook (an ultraslim, long-lived laptop), in practice both the new and the old version are very similar in their appeal and very attractive from many perspectives. Both also share similar drawbacks on price and battery life, but their target audience is clearly one that values style and sturdiness over such prosaic matters.

That’s not to say that HP, Dell and even lesser-known British companies such as Novatech are not all making excellent machines, all with long batteries, bright screens and Intel’s excellent i5 and i7 processors. Where Intel is struggling, however, is to avoid the commoditization of the laptop market – by focusing on the ‘ultrabook’ idea, then the risk is that laptops simply become screens with keyboards. With most users using a small fraction of processing potential, individual specifications scarcely matter.

So Samsung and Asus are both taking a similar approach, focusing on eye-catching design and particularly ultraslim design. While Asus’s idea is all brushed silver, Samsung’s is more businesslike; the new Series 9 continues the original’s i5 processor, now updated, and also uses a solid-state hard drive. That means, like all ultrabooks, it boasts very rapid start-up and very quick waking from sleep, but the Series 9’s top selling point is packing a 15” screen into the same size chassis as a normal 14” laptop, yet weighing just 1.59kg. The 13” model does the same and weighs 1.19kg. At 14.9mm and 12.9mm respectively, both models are a delight to handle. Battery life is up to about six hours, which is outstanding by old laptop standards and mediocre by new ones. The Series 9 keyboard is better than Asus’s equivalent, but overall the compromise is between design and performance