By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Isn’t ironic that the one company that’s come rather late to the notebook game is the one that seems to provide all the necessary components to other manufacturers?

Samsung isn’t the first name to come to mind when selecting notebooks. Not when the likes of Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, ASUS,  Sony, Toshiba and Apple have been in the game for a much longer time, at least in North America.

But peek into many of notebooks made by the aforementioned companies and you might be surprised to find Samsung branded LCD displays, RAM memory chips, hard drives, SSD (solid State Drives, radios, optical drives and chipsets.

So when Samsung makes its own notebooks, one would expect greatness or at least some solid and well engineered devices that can go toe-to-toe with the competition.

Their most notable products are the Series 9 and Series 5 general purpose ultrabooks.

Samsung Series 9

 

Looking at the Samsung Series 9, it is almost scary to see how good Samsung has gotten at this in so short a time. In terms of design, build quality, feature set and most importantly power and portability, this notebook is tough to beat.

From the outside, the Samsung Series 9 (SRT of $1299 for the 13.3-inch model with 126GB SSD and 4GB of RAM) looks like it was forged out of a single sheet of metal.

This is a thin, 3 pound notebook that offers a pretty impressive set of specs. Starting with the latest Intel Core i5 CPU running at 1.7GHz, an ample 4GB of RAM and a fast 128GB of fast SSD memory. You also get  a 13.3-inch LED-backlit display with a resolution of 1366×768 pixels, 400-nit brightness, 800:1 contrast ratio with 16 million colors, 130 degree wide viewing angle and an ambient light sensor. All this in a case that looks more like that of a 12-inch screen model.

Designed for the discriminating mobile warrior the Series 9 is a true high performance Ultrabook,

Samsung Series 5

Samsung’s Series 5 notebook is a midrange model line made up of 13, 14 and  15.6-inch notebooks. The Series 5 is a 13-inch model that has a SRT of $800 and offers a 14-inch 1366 x 768 display, 500GB of storage space and a AMD dual-core CPU.

It is efficient with power consumption and allows users the time for auto shut off using auto button. Quickly turn off LCD with LCD button when you want to just listen to music. It features a backlit keyboard to use in darker settings. The Series 5 ships with 4GB of RAM, a capacious 500GB hard drive and the unit we tested proved to be a slim, light and versatile notebook. Samsung has sweetened the deal with JBL sound as well as a 6.6 hour battery to boot.

With the Series 5 and Series 9, Samsung is well positioned to compete in the professional market as well as develop the consumer space with some of the most exciting notebook PCs we’ve seen.