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

Read More

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (U.S. Cellular)

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (U.S. Cellular). U.S. Cellular subscribers love their carrier, and they'll probably love it more with 4G LTE. But the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 isn't the best way to keep the love flowing. While it's the first tablet to use the super-fast network on the nation's most adored carrier, it's last year's model and suffers from app availability problems that all Android tablets are currently struggling with.

Hardware, Design, and OS
The U.S. Cellular Tab is actually the same hardware as the Verizon Wireless Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which we gave a 3.5-star rating to when we reviewed it last September. But as often happens when carriers are six months late with a product, we're knocking the tablet down half a point because the world has moved on, but the Galaxy Tab 10.1 hasn't.

The Galaxy Tab is a now-traditional slab-style tablet, 10.1 by 6.9 by .34 inches (HWD) and 19.9 ounces. It has a 10.1-inch, 1280-by-800 screen (thus the name) and a slightly textured gray back. It's slim and relatively light for a tablet its size. U.S. Cellular's one model is the 32GB unit, which offers about 27GB of space for user files; there's also a microSD card slot. Battery life was similar to the new Apple iPad, at 5 hours, 15 minutes of video playback time with the screen brightness cranked up to max. (The Galaxy Tab has a lower-resolution screen than the iPad, but it's also considerably lighter.)

The tablet runs Google Android Honeycomb 3.2 with Samsung's TouchWiz extensions, including a little bar of desk accessory-like applications including a calendar and memo pad which pop up from the bottom of the screen.

We've been over this ground before, and you should read our original Galaxy Tab 10.1 review and our Verizon Galaxy Tab 10.1 review to get a full picture of the device. The news here is the carrier, the service plans, and the timing.

Coverage and Service Plans
U.S. Cellular is the seventh-largest carrier in the nation, with about six million customers in 26 states. Outside the carrier's native coverage area, U.S. Cellular roams on Verizon and Sprint, offering nationwide 3G coverage. The carrier won our Readers' Choice award by a considerable margin thanks to positive opinions of its fees, coverage and reliability.

U.S. Cellular's LTE network currently covers six regions: Madison/Milwaukee, Wisc.; Lawton-Wichita Falls, TX-OK; Bangor-Portland, ME; Presque Isle-Houlton, ME; rural eastern North Carolina and metropolitan Iowa. It's currently the only LTE carrier in Maine, but at least part of all of those other areas are covered by Verizon's 4G LTE. The carrier plans to expand throughout 2012 and 2013.

We haven't been out to test U.S. Cellular's 4G network, and U.S. Cellular isn't quoting speeds publicly. But because of U.S. Cellular's comfortable spectrum position, we expect it to function more like Verizon's network than like MetroPCS's. That means average download speeds around 9.5Mbps, as our Fastest Mobile Networks tests showed last year.

2011's Device, Now In 2012
Here's the difference six months makes. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 no longer runs a current version of Android—its 3.2 has been supplanted by 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), and although Samsung promises a 4.0 upgrade, the company hasn't given a timetable for it.

The Galaxy Tab's 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor is also starting to look slow compared with quad-core tablets like the Asus Transformer Prime and others soon hitting the market. And Toshiba's Excite 10 LE has become the thinnest Android tablet around.

The Galaxy Tab's biggest problem, though, is apps. While the Tablified Market third-party directory lists about 1,500 good Android tablet apps, that's much fewer than you'll find on an iPad. You can run Android phone apps on this tablet, but they'll often look awful. Google has shifted its development focus to Ice Cream Sandwich, which makes us hesitant to recommend Android tablets not running ICS like this one.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is U.S. Cellular's only 4G LTE tablet, but we have a better idea. The carrier lets you use its Android phones as Wi-Fi hotspots, and it plans to sell a standalone MiFi-style hotspot as well. If you're interested in speeding along on the nation's most-loved network, get a Samsung Galaxy S Aviator, U.S. Cellular's upcoming 4G LTE phone, or U.S. Cellular's upcoming standalone Samsung 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot. Then pair one of those with the Wi-Fi-only models of the new Apple iPad, Apple iPad 2 or Asus Transformer Prime Wi-Fi tablet. You'll get the best of both worlds: U.S. Cellular's LTE service with a better tablet, and no extra two-year contract.

Read More

Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US)

Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US). A 14-inch screen and built-in DVD burner make the Samsung Series 5 Ultra (NP530U4B-A01US) stand out from the ultrabook crowd. Optical drive and 14-inch screen top generic ultrabooks. Hybrid hard drive system almost as fast as SSDs, with more space. WiDi. No big advantage in weight or battery life over ultraportables and 14-inch slimlines.

With its DVD±RW drive and full array of ports, the NP530U4B-A01US splits the difference between ultrabooks like the Dell XPS 13 and ultraportables like the Editors' Choice Toshiba Portege R835-P50X. It also requires a model-number microscope to distinguish from the NP530U3B-A01US, which is a 13.3-inch ultrabook with no optical drive.

Design
At 0.8 by 13.1 by 9.0 inches (HWD), the Series 5 Ultra is fractionally bigger than 13.3-inch ultrabooks and fractionally smaller than 14-inch laptops like the Lenovo IdeaPad U400. It sports a handsome silver-gray aluminum lid and palm rest with a flat black chiclet-style keyboard.

The keyboard is not backlit, but has a comfortable if somewhat shallow typing feel with an exemplary layout including dedicated, full-sized Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys. The large touchpad also has dedicated left and right mouse buttons instead of just clickable corners, making it a pleasure to use.

The Series 5 Ultra's 14-inch display has the same 1,366 by 768 resolution you'll find throughout the ultrabook segment. It's nicely bright (300 nits), with a non-reflective matte finish and average viewing angles, and showed minimal flex without feeling flimsy in our grasp-by-the-corners test. Two dinky speakers above the keyboard provide sufficiently loud and clear audio, if not booming bass.

Features
Oddly, our test unit's 802.11n Wi-Fi wouldn't work out of the box, reporting no wireless networks within range even when we pressed Fn-F12 for Samsung's convenient wireless control panel to make sure it was switched on. We used the system restore function to return the Series 5 Ultra to factory defaults, after which Wi-Fi worked fine. Other wireless functions include Bluetooth and Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) for streaming screen and sound to an HDTV set equipped with a $100-or-so Belkin or Netgear adapter.

Next to the tray-loading DVD±RW drive on the Samsung's right side are a USB 2.0 port and SD/MMC memory-card slot. At the left are Ethernet, VGA, and HDMI ports; a headphone/microphone jack; and two USB 3.0 ports.

The Series 5 Ultra's storage system combines a 500GB hard drive (420GB free) with a 16GB solid-state drive dubbed Express Cache. The latter doesn't appear as a drive letter or partition, but is used to speed up booting and resume from sleep, which we stopwatched at roughly 34 and 3 seconds respectively.

Samsung supports the Series 5 Ultra with a one-year warranty. In addition to Windows 7 Home Premium, its software preload includes a 60-day trial of Norton Internet Security, the kudzu-like WildTangent games, and a handful of Samsung-brand utilities ranging from Easy Settings (a friendly alternative to digging through Windows Control Panel) to a Mac OS Dock-like (or Windows Taskbar-like) program launcher.

TextArticle

Read More

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Wi-Fi)

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Wi-Fi). The thinnest tablet currently available. Excellent 10.1-inch HD screen. Honeycomb 3.1 brings improved multitasking, Flash support, and a higher-quality user experience. Comes with earbuds—a rarity for a tablet.
TouchWiz UI means update delays for future Android versions. App selection is weak. Even with a strong Wi-Fi signal, online video playback sputtered in our tests. The Wi-Fi–only Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the thinnest Honeycomb tablet available, and it's very capable, but its Touchwiz UI means Android updates are in doubt.

Design and Features


The back panel houses the rear-facing 3-megapixel camera lens. A front-facing 2-megapixel lens is situated on the front panel, and both lenses sit in the middle of the long top edge of the tablet, for horizontal use. Near the lenses, on the top panel, there's a 3.5mm headphone jack that is thoughtfully accompanied by a pair of standard-issue earbuds. The earbuds aren't terribly good, but something is better than nothing, which is what you get with nearly every other competing tablet.

Along the side panels, there are left and right internal speakers; the top edge houses the Power and Volume controls, and on the bottom panel there's a proprietary connection for the included charging/sync cable, which connects the tablet to both your computer and the AC adapter via USB.

Just like all the recent Honeycomb tablets, the Tab 10.1 is powered by Nvidia's dual-core Tegra 2 processor. The tablet supports 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and there's built-in GPS, an accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass. While the Tab will handle 1080p video, there's no HDMI output to mirror to an HDTV, unlike many other Honeycomb tablets such as the Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 ($399-499, 3.5 stars). And there's no USB port, either.

Performance

Because all Honeycomb tablets thus far have shipped with the same Tegra 2 CPU inside, our system test results (on the BenchmarkPi or GUIMark2 Flash tests) for the Galaxy Tab 10.1, even after the TouchWiz update, are very similar to those for almost every other Honeycomb tablet. Until a current-gen Android tablet emerges that doesn't use Tegra 2, this is unlikely to change. That said, that Tegra 2 means strong overall processor performance, with smooth UI navigation and fast loading times for most Flash-based websites. The one change we noticed with the TouchWiz update was diminished browser performance; the TouchWiz browser was noticeably slower than the stock Honeycomb browser.


Honeycomb and TouchWiz

Android 3.0 "Honeycomb," Google's tablet-specific OS, hasn't varied much at all from tablet to tablet so far. In a nutshell, it is a very capable OS—a tad cluttered at times, but more customizable than Apple's iOS. App selection for Honeycomb is weak, whereas Apple's iPad-optimized app selection is quite strong, so there is a need for improvement in this category, but it seems more up to developers than anyone else. Google recently released Android 3.1 (the Galaxy Tab 10.1 ships with it) to most existing Honeycomb tablets, and there have thus far been few manufacturer customizations. This Android version brings better multitasking (you can now open upwards of 20 apps simultaneously instead of just five) and full support for Adobe Flash 10.3. (As you might have heard, the iPad 2 has no Flash support whatsoever.) To better understand the OS, check out our Honeycomb review.

At the beginning of August, Samsung rolled out the update it promised for the Galaxy Tab, adding its custom TouchWiz interface to the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Though most of the changes are aesthetic and minor, and many are seemingly pointless (like changing the standard Honeycomb icons, which everyone does but no one needs to), there are more than a few really useful changes here.

The TouchWiz update added a number of new apps to the device, and gave it a total aesthetic overhaul. Let’s start with the aesthetics: Nearly every app, menu, and window has been redesigned, from the browser to the notifications window, which is now called the Quick Panel. The browser redesign didn’t appeal to me—I like Honeycomb’s grayscale look, and TouchWiz makes everything very black-on-white—but others, like the Quick Panel, are welcome. You can now access and toggle Wi-Fi, GPS, sound, and more straight from the pop-up notifications window, which saves a ton of time you'd otherwise spend digging in Settings to turn things on and off.

The Home Screen has also been redesigned, from the aforementioned button changes to the layout of the screens. Samsung fills all five home screens with widgets upon widgets; there’s one for the weather, a large clock, a photo gallery, and widgets corresponding to Samsung’s email, calendar, and social apps. It only takes about a minute to remove the widgets from the home screen, but they make the device feel just busy. Not to mention they slow down the home screen performance noticeably.

Samsung’s best addition, and something I hope Android makes standard, is the Mini Apps Tray. There’s a small arrow button in the middle of the bottom bar that, when pressed, pops up a list of apps: Task Manager, Calendar, World Clock, Pen memo, Calculator, and Music Player. They’re not full apps, but little widgets à la those on the Mac OS X Dashboard. When you choose an app, it pops up over whatever app you’re in; take a note or add a calendar appointment, hit Done, and it gets saved to the correct app without you ever really switching. This is incredibly useful for, say, making a calendar event out of an email or changing your music; it's the closest thing I’ve seen to true multitasking on a tablet, and I hope it only grows from its current, somewhat limited state. (Customization of those apps would be nice, for instance, and they have a tendency to lag.)

TouchWiz brings with it a bunch of different apps, most of which are standard TouchWiz fare. Media Hub is a place to buy and rent movies and music; Social Hub combines a bunch of social networks, calendars, and email services into one manageable inbox; Samsung Apps opens the curated Samsung app store. Amazon Kindle, Words with Friends, and Swype (a keyboard replacement) are also bundled in. Swype is an excellent tablet keyboard, and it’s certainly a welcome addition here. There’s also, mercifully, a dedicated on-screen button for taking screenshots, which most people won’t care about but makes the life of a tech journalist far easier.

Otherwise, the changes are mostly Samsung’s subtle “we can do this better than Google” modifications to the Email, Calendar, Music, and Videos apps, among others. And honestly, they’re solid and more polished than the Google apps; I preferred a few of them.

Otherwise, there’s not much to see here—TouchWiz is more of a refining and polishing of Honeycomb than a total reimagining of the operating system. A couple of gestures are supported, like the ability to put two fingers on the screen and tilt the entire device toward you or away from you to zoom in or out on the page, though why you’d ever need to do that escapes me. Much is the same here, and it’s certainly not the jarring change to Android that TouchWiz is on the Galaxy S, which makes the phone completely different to use than other Android phones.

The biggest mistake Samsung may have made is releasing the Galaxy Tab 10.1 without TouchWiz in the first place. Users accustomed to Honeycomb will have to adapt to the new changes, and may not like doing so. The real potential problem here, though, is that when Google pushes out further updates to the OS, Samsung will have to first customize them and then push out that update to its customers. Samsung's customers in the mobile phone world know firsthand that it can take a long time—months or years—before the company deems its Android updates ready for release. Tread carefully here, and don't buy the Galaxy Tab based on improvements you hope to see from future updates.

Read More

Tablet Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (16GB)

Place the Galaxy Tab 10.1 next to the iPad 2, and you might mistake one for the other. They both have a black bezel that surrounds the screen and a silver edge all the way around their bodies. The most immediate difference between them is that the iPad features a physical home button on the bottom bezel (when you hold the tablet in portrait orientation), while the Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn’t have any physical buttons anywhere on its bezel. (Honeycomb instead uses onscreen buttons exclusively.)

The second thing you’re likely to notice is that they’re not the same size. At 10.1 inches high and 6.9 inches wide, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is higher than the 9.5x7.3-inch iPad 2, but not quite as wide. This disproportion is mostly a function of their different screen sizes. The Galaxy Tab 10.1’s display measures 1,280x800 pixels, while the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen is 1,024x768. This also means that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has a wider aspect ratio (16-to-10) than the iPad 2 (4-to-3). If your primary reason for wanting a tablet is to watch lots of wide-screen movies, the Galaxy Tab 10.1’s higher resolution and wider screen would be the smarter choice.

The 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab is on the left; the 10.1-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is in the middle; and the 9.7-inch Apple iPad 2 is on the right.

You’ll also find fewer physical buttons on the edges of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 than on the iPad 2. They both have power/lock buttons and volume-rocker switches, but the iPad 2 also has a switch that can mute the volume or lock the display’s orientation. If you want to mute the Galaxy Tab 10.1, you have to manually lower its volume or set the volume level in the device’s onscreen settings. Also, locking the Galaxy Tab 10.1’s display orientation is only possible via its settings menus. Both the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and iPad 2 sport 3.5mm stereo-headset mini-jacks. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 comes with a stereo headset in the box, and the iPad 2 does not.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the iPad both include front- and rear-facing cameras. The iPad 2’s front-facing camera is positioned on the top bezel when holding the tablet in portrait orientation. In contrast, the Galaxy Tab 10.1’s front-facing camera is on the top bezel when holding the device in landscape orientation. Where the respective manufacturers placed their front-facing cameras indicates how each envisions the devices being used most often. For the Galaxy Tab 10.1 it’s landscape mode, for the iPad 2 it’s portrait mode.

Among the things the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has that the iPad 2 doesn’t is a flash for its rear-facing camera. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 also has a pair of stereo speakers (one on each side, when in landscape mode), while the iPad 2 has just a single speaker located on its back face. One thing that both the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and iPad lack, though, is the ability to add removable storage. Unlike the Galaxy Tab 10.1’s 7-inch predecessor, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 doesn’t have a MicroSD card slot.

Read More