Overall, we found roughly six to seven hours of constant use battery life with WiFi switched on, which is impressive enough for a machine of this size. Turn up the performance with several applications running simultaneously, as well as a dash of 3D software, and you may bring the battery life down to the 4 or 5 hour mark, though given that it’s not a powerhouse made for photos, video editing, or gaming, we’d be pretty hard pressed to find someone buying this laptop with those uses in mind.
We didn’t notice much heat coming from the laptop, with the machine getting warm when heavy processing was happening, but it wasn’t anywhere near what we’d consider hot. There wasn’t any noise, either, with no fans kicking in to bring the noise up. In fact, we liked just how un-noise and silent the Series 9 is.
If it’s not obvious from how much we’ve written on the new Series 9, we’re loving this machine. It is an excellent product, and there were only a few things we took issue with.
One of these is the connectivity options, with the memory card slot not entirely flush with the case, and strangely, only one of the two USB port supporting the new USB 3.0 technology. We’re not sure why one is USB 2.0 and the other is USB 3.0, but we’d have preferred if both were the new high-speed ports.
Even with the USB 3.0 port, the data transfer performance isn’t as fast as other computers, with 500MB of data transferred in roughly 10 seconds, half the speed we had with the 1GB in 10 seconds on the latest Apple MacBook Pro.
Another slightly confusing thing about the new Series 9 is the power cable.
It’s obvious from the design of the laptop – even with the premium styling on the box – that Samsung has paid an immense amount of attention into how the Series 9 looks and feels, doing its best to out-Apple Apple, so to speak.
But there’s one area where Samsung has missed the mark: the power cable.
For years, Apple’s power cables have been small and easy to carry, with an element of cable organisation thrown in for good measure. Last year, Asus showed us that it noticed just what sort of design choices were good to have in its own thin and light notebook, by making the power-pack of the ZenBook slimmer and easier to carry.
Yet Samsung’s Series 9 battery pack hasn’t changed much to make it easier to carry. Sure, it’s smaller than many of the charge packs we see for laptops, but compared to the simple packs used by Apple and Asus, it still has a very old school PC look to it, with a clunky three prong cable connecting to a small brick that lacks any cable management outside of a velcro strip.
Conclusion
At the moment, every sub-notebook manufacturer is playing catch-up to Apple, and trying to find the perfect take on Apple’s MacBook Air.
Samsung’s latest attempt makes a very close play for the title, and manages to prove in the process that it is probably the best candidate outside of Apple to create a breathtakingly thin and light laptop. It’s especially telling that while both this and the MacBook Air don’t conform to Intel’s Ultrabook specification – and therefore aren’t technically “Ultrabook” notebooks – both manage to be excellent ultra-light laptops filled with awesome.
Overall, if you’re in the market for a thin new Windows laptop, it’s hard to do better than the Series 9, and it’s a machine we’d easily recommend.
How does this not conform to the ultrabook specification?
From what I recall, Samsung, like Apple, doesn’t follow Intel’s Ultrabook specification to the t, and while it might seem like an Ultrabook, it isn’t.
For all intents and purposes it is, and yet technically, it isn’t.