Samsung Notebook Series 9

The Samsung Series 9 notebook is one of the thinnest and lightest 13.3in notebooks on the Australian market to feature a Second Generation Intel Core i5 CPU. It's beautifully designed and crafted and it feels very comfortable to use, whether you're typing at a desk or on your lap. With a price tag of $2499, it's not cheap, but it's definitely worth it if you want superb mobility and build quality as well as very decent performance for office and multimedia tasks.

Build quality

The Series 9 is constructed out of
Duralium (a type of light and strong aluminium alloy that's also used to construct aircraft frames). It weighs around 1.3kg and it feels solidly built. The screen's lid has a little bit of flexibility, but only minimal puddling can be seen on the screen when you stress it. While the Series 9 has a sealed design (which makes it very hard for an end user to service it), its base consists of two parts that are held together by screws. This means that movement isn't completely absent and sometimes when you pick up the notebook it will make a little clicking noise as the two parts come together slightly — this was particularly noticeable on the left side of the unit. That nitpick aside, it's still a very strong chassis design.

The balance of the notebook is excellent. You can lift the lid using one finger while the notebook is resting on a hard, flat surface. The hinges are very smooth and they hold the lid in place even when the notebook is subjected to a lot of up and down motion (while commuting, for example). We did notice a very small amount a play in the hinges though — they felt a little loose when moving the screen upward — but it wasn't problematic.

A cooling fan is present in the chassis and its vent is underneath the base. It's not an optimal location for vent holes; if you use the Series 9 on your lap or on any other surface that blocks these vents for a long period of time, the base has the potential to get uncomfortably warm — not as uncomfortable as the Toshiba Portege R700 though, which runs a full-blown Core i5 CPU rather than a low voltage model. For the most part though, the Series 9 runs very cool. If all you'll be doing is typing a document or browsing a Web page while resting it on your lap, then you probably won't be bothered by much warmth from the chassis.

Screen quality

The 1366x768-resolution screen is one of the better ones we've seen on a laptop to date. It has a matte finish, so it's not susceptible to reflections, and its contrast and brightness are excellent, making it perfect for viewing photographs. It's so bright, you can relatively easily use the Series 9 to type out a document or read a Web page when sitting outside on a sunny day, but by the same token it can be uncomfortable to use in a dark environment.

To keep the screen brightness comfortable, an ambient light sensor sits just above the keyboard and it can automatically adjust the brightness depending on the lighting conditions in your environment. However, it didn't always work perfectly: we sometimes had to disable and re-enable the Adaptive Brightness setting in the Samsung Control Centre software in order for it to detect the proper brightness level. It was also very sensitive: switching on a corner light in an otherwise dark room made the screen a lot brighter than it should have.

Keyboard and touchpad

We love the Series 9's keyboard, which has sturdy, full-sized keys that give almost perfect responsiveness. There is a white backlight under the keyboard, and it has eight levels of adjustment. The first three levels are very subtle and only just illuminate the keys; it's nice to have so much control over this feature.

The touchpad that resides on the Series 9's 90mm deep palmrest is one of the best we have ever used. It is large (98x68mm) and highly responsive to basic movements and multi-finger gestures, and its texture is soft and smooth. In our tests, we could easily scroll long Web pages using a two-finger gesture — it wasn't frustrating like it can be on laptops with smaller touchpads. The page didn't move too fast or too slow and we didn't ever have trouble with the gesture not being recognised. Likewise, using a three-finger gesture to flick back and forth between Web pages was a simple task.

The buttons for left- and right-click operations are located underneath the touchpad itself, which is what allows the touchpad to be so big and comfortable. It's similar to the touchpad found on some HP notebooks (such as the AMD Fusion-based Pavilion dm1), but much easier to use — you can easily left-click and drag using only one hand. The only fault that we found with the touchpad was that sometimes we had to press the right button twice in order for it to work, and this was usually because we pressed slightly too high on the initial click.

Battery life

The Series 9, much like the MacBook Air, has a sealed design, which means that the battery is housed inside the chassis and is not accessible externally. It has a 6-cell battery with a 5900mAh rating and it lasted 3hr 16min in our rundown test, in which we disable power management, enable Wi-Fi, maximise screen brightness and loop an Xvid-encoded video. It's not a spectacular time and part of this can be attributed to the screen, which is the brightest we've seen in recent times. When we used the laptop for basic Web browsing and word processing, and with a medium brightness setting, we got just over five hours of battery life out of it.

Samsung supplies a shortcut (Fn-F6) to quickly change the power profile from Performance, to either Balanced or Long Battery Life. You also get the Battery Life Extender utility, which, if enabled, will only charge the battery up to 80 per cent of its capacity. Samsung claims that by not charging the battery to its full capacity, it can undergo more charging cycles without depleting; it can therefore last longer than a battery that would otherwise always be charged to its fullest capacity. The drawback is that you lose a little battery life.

Specifications and performance

Inside the slim confines of the Series 9 chassis resides an Intel Core i5-2537M Sandy Bridge-based CPU. It's an ultra-low voltage CPU that has a frequency of 1.4GHz, two cores and Hyper-Threading. It's not terribly fast, but it doesn't need to be unless you want the Series 9 to be your main computer for everything (and it's not designed for that). Along with 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM, a 128GB solid state drive and integrated Intel HD graphics, the Series 9 produced decentresults in our tests.

It recorded 1min 19sec in the Blender 3D rendering test and 1min 29sec in the iTunes MP3 encoding test. These results are only a little slower than what a laptop with a full-voltage Intel Core i3 CPU can achieve and what they tell us is that the Series 9 is perfect for most office work and simple media creation tasks. If you want to perform tougher tasks on it, such as video transcoding or editing, then it will be slow — this was shown in the AutoGordianKnot test, which took 1hr 55min to complete. That's about 40min longer than a typical Core i3-based notebook and 65min longer than a high-end Core i7-based notebook.

In 3DMark06, a score of 2394 was reached, which means the notebook is fine for processing photos and videos, but not good when it comes to crunching real-time 3D graphics.

Its solid state drive was very fast in our tests, recording a file transfer speed of 106MB per second (when copying data from one location on the drive to another). The solid state drive's 128MB capacity isn't as high as what Apple offers for its MacBook Air (256MB), but unless you want to carry a library of movies with you at all times, it should be adequate. Apart from its speed, the solid state drive doesn't take up as much space as a mechanical hard drive, and it also allows the Series 9 to run cooler and more quietly. Furthermore, your data isn't as much at risk if you drop or bump the laptop.

Ports and slots

The Series 9 has two concealed port clusters on each side that can be opened and closed. There is a USB port on each side, with the port on the left side also capable of running at USB 3.0 speed. The USB 2.0 port on the right side also supports Chargeable USB, which allows USB devices to be charged even when the laptop is switched off.

Other features include a combination headphone/microphone port, a MicroSD 

slot, a Micro-HDMI port and a port for a breakout Gigabit Ethernet port. It's a very neat port layout and the biggest components are the USB ports. Photographers might be annoyed that there isn't a full-sized SD card slot, as it means a USB adapter will have to be used. What's also annoying is that a Micro-HDMI to full-sized-HDMI adapter is not supplied in the package.

You also get a 1.3-megapixel webcam, Bluetooth and 802.11n Wi-Fi. We would have liked a better wireless card though; the Broadcom adapter that is used does not support dual-band operation and will only work with 2.4GHz wireless networks.

Conclusion

Overall, the Samsung Series 9 is a superb notebook. If you ever get the chance to use it, you'll probably fall in love with it, and that's because it's so thin and light, yet strong and extremely comfortable to use. It has an excellent screen, a fast solid state drive and its ultra-low voltage Core i5 CPU gives it good performance. We also like the small wall-wart adapter that ships with it, which helps keep the overall weight of the package under 1.5kg when travelling. As far as ultraportable laptops are concerned, it's hard to beat.