Samsung Series 9 15-inch (NP900X4B-A02US)

Samsung Series 9 15-inch (NP900X4B-A02US). Samsung gets a jump on Apple's anticipated 15-inch MacBook Air with the super-slim and -sexy Samsung Series 9 15-inch (NP900X4B-A02US). Incredibly thin and light for a 15-inch laptop. Bright, hi-res display. WiDi. Expensive. Shallow keyboard. Slippery touchpad. Only 57GB of 128GB SSD available at startup. VGA and HDMI dongles not included.

Design
The Series 9 15-inch (NP900X4B-A02US) boasts an aluminum one-piece shell in a handsome shade— Samsung calls it Titan Silver—with a touch of dark blue. It measures 0.6 by 14 by 9.3 inches (HWD), with an ample palm rest and space on either side of the black tile keyboard.

The keyboard has dedicated Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys but no numeric keypad. It offers a tolerable typing feel, but shallower travel than the Spectre and some other thicker systems' keyboards, and is backlit, but quite dimly—we had trouble detecting the backlight in all but the darkest environments. The large touchpad has clickable lower corners instead of dedicated mouse buttons; it has a smooth, almost slippery feel. Annoyingly, it occasionally failed to register our taps on the touchpad surface, but a driver update during our testing helped.

The 15.0-inch display is not dim or dark in the slightest—it's impressively bright even with the backlight dialed down a notch, with a matte finish, sharp contrast, and crisp colors as well as the extra resolution (1,600 by 900 versus 1,366 by 768) that's a real treat for multitaskers or image editors and unavailable on 13.3-inch ultrabooks except for the Asus Zenbook UX31-RSL8. Impressively for such a thin system, the screen shows next to no flex or wobble when grasped by the corners, as opposed to more bendy ultrabooks such as the Toshiba Portege Z835-P370 .

Features
Samsung earns kudos for including an SD card slot—hidden behind a nifty folding door on the laptop's right side—and three USB ports—two USB 3.0 on the right and one USB 2.0 on the left. Other ports are miniaturized, with a micro Ethernet port (dongle included) and micro HDMI port (dongle not included) on the left and a micro VGA port (dongle not included) on the right. In case you haven't guessed, the super-skinny Samsung has no optical drive.

Wireless connectivity options include the trifecta of 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Intel Wireless Display (WiDi), but not the Intel Smart Connect technology that lets the HP Envy 14 Spectre and Dell XPS 13 update e-mail, social network, and other information while the system sleeps.

Samsung backs the Series 9 15-inch with a one-year warranty, and fills its 128GB SSD—all but a scanty 57GB of it out of the box—with an array of helpful system-settings utilities, 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security, Skype, the WildTangent games suite, and a recovery partition. The system's cold boot times, helped by a Fast Boot utility that turns off Windows 7's startup animation, averaged a blazing 17 seconds and its resume-from-sleep times 2.5 seconds by our stopwatch.

TextArticle

Posted in: Laptop,Samsung