From television sets to mobiles, there's no denying that being the slimmest gadget around does wonders for desirability, irrespective of the performance.
Samsung's new Series 9 notebook however, also has the performance to go with the looks. Clad in all-black duralumin (an alloy used in airplane construction, twice the strength of aluminum), the Series 9 is lightweight (1.3kg) and yet durable. The tradeoff with the slim design is that there is no optical drive and ports are minimal.
On the left side is a USB 2.0 port, microSD card slot, 3.5mm audio port and on the right side is a USB 3.0 port, mini HDMI and a proprietary port to connect the Ethernet adapter (the only adapter in the box). The ports are hidden under pull down covers much like the ones on the first gen Apple MacBook Air. The notebook has a 13.3-inch widescreen display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels.
It comes with Samsung's Superbright Plus technology that makes the display stand out with vivid colors, pin-sharp clarity and super-high brightness levels which are the highest we've seen. It also has a backlit chicklet-style keyboard with the function keys doubling up as keys for adjusting brightness, volume and switching between various power modes.
Keys with dual functions like the Wi-Fi /F12 key and function lock have blue LED indicators to show that they are active, which is very helpful. Right below the keyboard is the touchpad with integrated mouse buttons -a responsive affair with multi-touch capability. The keyboard and touchpad are very comfortable, though the design and style is directly lifted from Apple's MacBook.
Under the hood, our Series 9 test unit had a second generation Intel Core i5 1.4Ghz processor , Intel HD 3000 graphics and 4GB of RAM (up to 8GB RAM is supported).
It does away with a standard notebook hard drive in favour of a 128GB SSD drive (for speed, spacesaving and weight saving) and comes preloaded with Windows 7 Home Premium. It scored 4.7 on the Windows Experience Index with the lowest score for graphics performance.
With this rating, the notebook is great for most day-to-day work - browsing, working on documents, music, videos and playing online games. We even played a few games -the Series 9 had no issues running games like Counter-Strike CZ and Left for Dead at low settings.
Closing the lid puts it into sleep mode where no power is consumed, thus extending battery life. Also, thanks to the SSD and Samsung's 'Fast Start' technology, it takes just about 3 seconds to be fully functional from sleep mode.
Samsung claims a battery backup of 7 hours on a single charge, however, we managed just over five and half hours, which is great for such a slim notebook , but not up to the claim. The problem is the price. Pegged at Rs 99,990, it's priced higher than the top-end 13-inch Apple MacBook Air (Rs 98,900).
Even the Lenovo X1, which also weighs 1.3kg, has an with Intel Core i5 (2.5Ghz) processor, 8GB RAM, 160GB SSD and 13.3-inch gorilla glass display is priced at Rs 85,000. To be competitive, the Series 9 needs to drop its price by at least 10,000. And then it'll truly impress.
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