The ongoing spat between Samsung and Apple is in a way ironically representative of the Korean electronics company’s coming of age in the field of good design.

In recent years, Samsung has turned up the heat with its designs, that too with a minimalist bias. It started with its smartphone about two years ago. The Samsung Galaxy devices were prettier and better designed (yes, many of us are still not fans of the materials used) than anything else we’d seen from the company till that point.

Now, it looks like the company has carried over this philosophy to its series of portable computing products as well. Samsung had launched its Series 9 notebooks earlier this year and now, they’ve revamped the series along with a couple of other line-ups and re-launched it in the market. Here’s how the second edition of one of the most high-end laptops by Samsung fares.

Design

Samsung seems to have taken the redesign of the Series 9 so seriously that it has utilised a whole new material altogether in the construct of the machine. Christened Duralumin, the new material is supposed to be twice as strong as aluminium and just as light. The material, commonly used in advanced aircraft and other highly specialised equipment lends the Series 9 a sleek look but more importantly gives it a certain amount of sturdiness thanks to its tensile strength.

The Series 9 looks like it has been on a low-carb diet that has gone right. The device is super-trim with only the least discernible bulges. The laptop gains a bit of curve towards the hinges, and measures just above half-an-inch at its thickest where it houses the ports.

The unit we reviewed sported a 13-inch LCD display. We needed no excuse to put the nice, matte screen to use. We watched a couple of movies including ‘Hachiko’ and ‘In Bruges’ as well as a couple of episodes of ‘Modern Family’. The laptop automatically detects when you switch a video or movie on and tweaks the multimedia settings accordingly. When you close the program after watching the video, it’ll turn Movie Mode off on its own.

The speakers on the Samsung Series 9 were one of the best we’ve come across in a laptop/Ultrabook in recent times. Although the speakers are lodged on the underside of the keypad, the sound is barely ever muffled. On the contrary, most of the media we listened to on the Ultrabook was loud and streamed with amazing clarity. This is not the kind of notebook you’ll need to plug in external speakers to even if you’re watching a sitcom with a couple of friends in the room. The screen, being a matte one, also makes for glare-free viewing and allows for viewing over a wide angle.

Connectivity

There are about eight connectivity ports on the machine. These include the usual USB ports (2.0 as well as 3.0), a mini-HDMI port, a miniVGA and a mini-Ethernet port. The headphone jack as well as the power plug-in both find space next to these connectors on either side of the Ultrabook.

The body has a rather unusual SD card slot which has a flexible flap that covers the memory card while in use and the port when you pull the card out.

Display and keyboard

The Samsung Series 9 features Samsung’s MaxScreen technology which has allowed the company to keep the bezel to a minimum and lend the screen as much real estate as they could manage. The 13-inch Series 9 weighs in at only about 1.16kg making it a superbly portable laptop .

The keyboard is nicely spaced and packs in all keys within the span of two palms so you don’t really have to move your hands around too much while typing. Personally, I found the keys on the island-style keypad a little too ‘flat’ for my taste, or touch rather. In other words, the keys lack ‘travel’ while you type away. This might make some early users wonder if the strokes registered at all. The keyboard is backlit with a soft blue hue when needed and is definitely a big plus for those whose digital lives are mostly nocturnal.

The keypad has a thin metallic trim running along the edges which shines whenever it catches the light. The keypad itself is super smooth, and recognised gestures and executed commands correctly most of the time. Sometimes, though, say when we had multiple tabs open in Google Chrome and were switching from one to another by tapping on it (using the trackpad) the system would drag the tab out instead of just clicking on it. Apart from small niggles such as these; we didn’t really face any major issues with the trackpad. Oh, and the trackpad is buttonless which seems to be the way to go for most high-end portables. However, there were times when it would confuse a right-click for a regular click and open a new page where we wanted none. The trackpad features palm-rejection software too but the space dedicated to the trackpad is not big enough for your entire palm to get in the way, in the first place. So, no worries there.

Performance and battery

The Samsung Series 9 notebook that we reviewed ran on a 1.9 GHz Core i7-3517U processor that can overclock up to 2.6GHz.

The battery life is one of the best we’ve seen in an Ultrabook. By default we use any laptop we review with the brightness a couple of notches down the usual nits. With a constant Wi-Fi connection, and after intermittent mail checking, IMing, a couple of internet videos, songs and almost a one-and-a-half-hour movie later, the laptop still had some juice left to keep us entertained. The official claim is close to seven hours and with the right features turned off or toned down, the Samsung Series 9 is easily capable of staying true to the claims. The notebook didn’t heat up considerably during the tests either.

We ran the NovaBench benchmarking tests on the Samsung Series 9 and got an average score of about 538 points.

It shot well-past the scores (309 points) raked in by the previous-gen Series 5 notebooks. It also fared much better than the likes of Dell XPS 13 and the Acer Aspire TimelineUltra M5 but lagged behind the Lenovo ThinkPad X230.

We say

In the slew of Ultrabooks, the Samsung Series 9 is a device that has the potential to woo those who are looking for great aesthetics and portability as well as superior performance. The Series 9 is clearly a premium experience and comes with a price tag which only a shade more than all the class it exudes.

Rs 1,02,990

Love – Extremely light and thin, good screen

Hate – Average keypad and trackpad, pricey device

>mahananda.bohidar@thehindu.co.in

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