Samsung Series 9 review (15-inch, 2012)

Samsung Series 9 (15-inch, 2012) review pictures

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If I had to distill the essence of the new Series 9 down to a single word, it would be "refined." Last year's model already had a sleek, minimalist design, but it looked a little bit too glossy, a little bit too plasticky, and perhaps a little bit too cheap. This year, the Series 9 somehow manages to simultaneously look subdued and sexy. Gorgeous expanses of textured matte black aluminum form all the primary surfaces, except for a shiny brushed aluminum rim: it runs around the entire base and lid of the machine, forming a fantastically flashy profile that draws attention to just how thin Samsung managed to make this PC.

Like the front lip of the Envy 14 Spectre, the matte black base of the Series 9 gently curves inwards, such that the laptop looks even thinner than it really is — like that silver rim is floating on air. The chassis construction is also top-notch: just like the MacBook Air, it's an extremely solid unibody aluminum frame, with just a slight seam showing where the bottom cover was carved out of the block. Also like the MacBook Air, the frame does tend to creak on occasion when you pick it up, and the matte black surfaces here do pick up quite a few fingerprints. My only major complaint with the design is Samsung's new lid hinge, which is both hard to open and a little wobbly when the screen is upright.

The silver rim also highlights a decent port selection. While you'll unfortunately have to settle for miniature HDMI, VGA and Ethernet ports, each of which require their own breakout adapters (the far-too-easy-to disconnect Ethernet one is included in the box) you do get one full-size USB 2.0 port on the left and two USB 3.0 ports on the right, as well as a clever SD card slot that tucks into the bottom of the frame under a small spring-loaded door. There's also a 3.5mm headset jack on the left, and a spot for the tiny power cord.

All in all, though the Series 9's design still cribs quite a few details from Apple, there's enough here to set it apart, and that's before we even consider that Samsung's crammed a 15-inch screen into this 3.5 pound, 0.58-inch thick laptop. Unlike the 15-inch Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3, you could actually call this one an ultrabook with a straight face.

The screen is where my praise for the Samsung Series 9 slows. Let me explain: there's been a trend recently towards thin-bezel displays in new laptops. For manufacturers trying to make a quick sale, it makes a lot of sense. Smaller borders around the screen make it look more desirable, and marketers can boast that they've fit a larger screen into a thinner, lighter machine than was ever before possible.

The problem is that actual LCD screen technology doesn't seem to have caught up, and the first batch of thin-bezel screens look slighly washed out and have iffy viewing angles compared to their counterparts. Samsung's 15-inch display is actually a good bit above average, a nice matte sunlight-viewable panel with a fairly reasonable 1600 x 900 resolution and 400 nits of brightness (that's fairly bright), but vertical viewing angles aren't great, and the laptop's flimsy hinge means they're easy to knock out of alignment. Colors are a bit washed out, and while the gamut isn't nearly as narrow as on the Envy 15, reds do look a good bit closer to orange and violets to blue than I'd hope for. If you're considering the spectrum of Windows laptops as a whole, it's really not bad, but a $1,500 premium machine should have a premium screen to go with it.

Meanwhile, the Series 9's speakers are a joke. They're not quite as bad as those on the 15-inch Acer Timeline Ultra M3 I recently reviewed, but they're not far off: they produce a moderately wide sound field, but they're tinny, harsh and filled with enough static that I found most music and plenty of standard computer sounds unbearable. Dear laptop manufacturers, please take note: don't house speakers inside thin metal or plastic palmrests, and don't point them down.

Keyboard

With nicely spaced chiclet keys, subtle mint-green backlighting, a set of Home, Page Up, Page Down and End buttons, and even a dedicated Function Lock button to let you quickly change the likes of brightness and volume without holding down the Fn key first, it's clear that a bit of thought was put into the new Series 9's keyboard. None of that made it comfortable for me to type on, though. The keys are stiff and feel extremely shallow, and between the flat, smooth keycaps and the clicky noises they make when depressed, typing felt like a mechanical chore rather than an extension of my body. Perhaps I'd get used to it over time, and perhaps I've just described your dream keyboard, but I highly doubt it. It's a shame, considering how good the original Series 9's original keyboard felt.

Touchpad

Speaking of the original Series 9, it used a nice Synaptics ClickPad, but the new machine has an Elan pad instead. Both let you depress the entire surface of the touchpad as a button. You won't find any discrete mouse buttons here. Assuming you're using the latest drivers, it's not bad. The Elan pad has a nice smooth physical surface, and most Windows gestures work pretty well, including the critical two-finger scrolling (complete with inertia) and both three- and four-finger swipes for multitasking maneuvers. Still, it's not nearly as responsive as I'd like, and using it is a bit of a chore. Compared to a MacBook or some of the better Windows laptops we've used, tap-to-click has a slight delay, pinch to zoom is extremely awkward, and, most importantly, plain ol' cursor tracking (you know, just moving around your pointer) feels abnormally slow even with the sensitivity turned up. It's servicable and I've used far worse, and Samsung says the drivers may improve from here on out. The laptop doesn't ship until April, and I'm already using drivers that are at least one revision newer than the original.

Speaking of power consumption, the 15-inch Series 9 is fairly frugal about that juice. Though I didn't get anywhere near the ten hours of battery life that Samsung promises, my unit ran for a full six hours on our Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of popular websites and high-res images with the screen set to 65 percent brightness. I also got about six hours of real-world work done on two occasions, which for me means multiple web browsers filled with auto-refreshing tabs, short video clips here and there, music playing in the background and push email.

To its engineers' credit, the Series 9 stays practically silent and quite cool in operation, too. The only time I ever noticed the fan or palmrests heating up at all was during my benchmark runs, and even then neither noise nor heat distracted me from my tasks.