The bad: Samsung calls this an ultrabook, but with a DVD drive, 500GB platter hard drive, and weighing nearly 4 pounds, it really doesn’t fit the ultrabook mold.
The bottom line: If you ignore the ultrabook branding, and instead think of this as a somewhat slim midsize, mainstream laptop, the Samsung Series 5 14-inch is a fine example of the form.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. The ultrabook — a concept built around mimicking the best parts of Apple’s MacBook Air — has now become so broad that nearly anything qualifies, at least if this latest example from Samsung is any indicator.
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The 14-inch Series 5 is a perfectly fine laptop. It may even be the right laptop for you. But at 3.9 pounds and 0.8 inches thick, one thing it is not is a superslim, superportable laptop, along the lines of other ultrabooks we’ve seen, such as the Dell XPS 13 or Toshiba Portege Z835.
As a reasonably compact $949 14-inch laptop (most retailers are selling it for $879), the Series 5 does a good job of offering the same mainstream-level performance we’ve been getting out of the current crop of ultrabooks, but with an optical drive, more ports and connections, and a big 500GB hard drive.
But that’s exactly the problem. Ultrabooks are supposed to rely on SSD storage; this model skirts the issue by adding a 16GB SSD for quick bootup to a standard 500GB HDD. And the tray-loading optical drive does nothing for thickness and weight. HP’s 14-inch Envy Spectre is guilty of some of the same transgressions, but at least has a full-size SSD and a smaller footprint.
I’m sure we’ll see many more average-size laptops being pitched as ultrabooks in the coming months. If they’re anything like the Samsung Series 5, they’ll be well-made, functional products, but ones that will quickly dilute the ultrabook concept — the first exciting new idea in laptops in several years — into nothingness.
Despite its tapered edge, the Samsung Series 5 doesn’t look especially thin at first glance. The matte aluminum finish is pleasant, and excellent for rejecting fingerprints, although the plastic bottom panel kills the mood a bit. Overall, this is a smart-looking sub-$1,000 laptop, which is important, as we’ve seen a lot of high-design 13-inch models in this price range, but 14 and 15-inch laptops around that $800-$900 mark tend to be plastic and clunky.
One design complaint: There’s a tray loading optical drive on the right side, and I found it far too easy to accidentally hit the eject button, popping open the drive almost anytime I tried to move the system.
Don’t be fooled by Samsung’s attempt to pitch this system as an ultrabook. Our review unit thankfully did not have the “ultrabook” sticker spotted on some other recent laptops, but Samsung’s Web site and the Web sites of retailers selling it all use that very loaded term. Pick it up; at a hair under 4 pounds, it’s not especially light, and it doesn’t feel much different than other mainstream 14-inch laptops, such as the Dell XPS 14z (which is a little thicker and heavier, but not by much).
The keyboard has the same island-style layout found on other recent Samsung laptops (and most every laptop released in the past couple of years). The keys have a pleasing matte finish to them, and are reasonably quiet while typing. Shift, Enter, Tab, and other important keys are large and easy to hit, but the spacebar is a little narrow for my taste.
Multimedia functions are also shortchanged, mapped to the alternate function of the F-keys. Some laptops, such as recent HP models, swap the F-key and the alternate F-key commands, giving you easier access to volume and brightness settings, for example. The large touch pad is responsive and has plenty of room for multitouch gestures. The all-important two-finger scroll was acceptable, but not the best I’ve seen on a Windows laptop.
The 14-inch display has a standard 1,366×768-pixel native resolution. For the price, that’s fine, although 14- and 15-inch laptops with that native resolution are starting to feel a bit old — it feels more at home on 11- or 13-inch laptops. Higher-end midsize laptops, ultrabook or not, come off much better with 1,600×900-pixel screens. Still, the screen’s matte, antiglare finish was welcome, as was the excellent horizontal off-axis viewing angles (vertical off-axis viewing was terrible, as it is on most laptops).
While we’ve knocked the Series 5 for being too thick to be a true ultrabook, it’s still fairly slim in the overall scheme of things, at least when it comes to fitting in ports and connections. The VGA and HDMI ports poke out from a recessed side panel, and the Ethernet port has a tiny door that flips open to fit in a Cat5 cable — similar to designs we saw on tiny Netbooks years ago. It obviously took a little juggling, but all the ports fit — including both USB 3.0 ports, which is at this point still a rarity.
The 14-inch Samsung Series 5 has the same Intel Core i5-2467M low-voltage CPU as many of the 13-inch ultrabooks we’ve tested. The performance was on par with those systems, but in this bigger 14-inch body, one might expect a non-ULV CPU. For everyday multitasking and productivity, it’s more than powerful enough, and certainly doesn’t feel like a low-power laptop. The Asus UX31 Zenbook and Lenovo U300s both have slightly faster ultrabook processors and did slightly better in our tests, but not by a large margin.
One of the big selling points of the ultrabook is its quick booting and quick resume from sleep. The bootup time was fine, about 20 seconds, but the resume from sleep was a mixed bag. Sometimes it started up again right away, other times it got stuck or resumed very slowly — at least compared to the MacBook Air. But this isn’t a problem exclusive to this model — we’ve had similar issues on most of the other current ultrabooks as well.
Keywords: Laptops , samsung laptops , Samsung Series 5 , Asus UX31 Zenbook , laptop battery life , hp 484170-001 battery , toshiba pa3534u-1bas battery
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