Samsung ATIV Book 9 Premium Ultrabook Review

Samsung has a way with its ATIV line as it spreads through its smartphones, Windows tablets and ultrabook. If there is one thing that this South Korean electronics giant has on its sleeve is that it has all the products plugged in every conceivable niche there is. That is why geeks are not much surprised to see a 15-inch premium ultrabook that has all the bells and whistles that makes it such as premium.

Just focus your eyes on this baby and for a moment think not of the price tag. You will find that the price justifies what you are getting in the box. This machine has a solid performer underneath with an Intel Core i7 running with a clock speed of 2 Ghz. It is paired with a powerful 8 GB RAM which is perfect in running the most demanding computing tasks that you can throw at it.

You can never go wrong with the compact and stylish design of this ultrabook. It is something that is brilliant and makes the machine say that it is premium all over. Just take a look at the sandblasted 100 percent aluminum finish which gives it an elegant matte finish. The form factor is one of the slimmest in the market today and it is exceptionally light and easy to carry despite its brute strength underneath.

Samsung’s leverage in the smartphone business is evident with the slew of software bundles that come with this machine. While impressive, we are of the opinion that the software that makes this machine more useful is but bloatware. You can live without these software but having these around would result in great entertainment.

The super bright screen is very useful especially under direct sunlight. The excellent sunlight legibility on this machine is something that is too awesome to look at. The display is rated at 400 nits which is twice as bright as your ordinary computer screen. It is also a display that comes with anti-reflection coating so you will not get much glare if you are using it outside.

The design of the keyboard and the touchpad assures that the user will get a very comfortable feel. The touchpad offers a lot of gesture controls that are useful for optimal control. The clickpad is a brilliant design coup as it is designed to ignore accidental palm movements. That is quite amazing for a package like this—then again it is something that consumers should not be surprised.

Since this is an ultrabook getting a lot of storage space is something of a pipe dream. We are pleasantly surprised knowing that his premium product comes packed with a generous 256 GB of flash memory drive. Again this is an ultrabook and the slim profile means that you are not getting a DVD drive to extend your storage options. You can use cloud storage options like Dropbox or some other cloud storage platform that can come in for free or for a fee.

The display resolution is at 1600 x 960 which is something that is not quite full HD but more than your standard HD resolution. This tweener of a resolution takes the cake both for display brilliance and optimum beauty. You will never go wrong with the resolution on this machine which is powered by Intel HD Graphics 4000. The GPU tells you that for gamers this machine is not for you. Go get some more heavy duty machine with more respectable GPU than what Intel has to offer. Make no mistake though you can still do most HD viewing and gaming on this one, just don’t expect the kind of graphics that would part the Red Sea.

The battery life is at 4.8 hours and it is something that we are quite anxious considering that this is an ultrabook. We are of the opinion that ultrabooks should last more than five hours at least. We reckon that it may be the powerful processor getting every bit of juice from the batteries. The amount of time you can have this baby on a battery is acceptable and you should not be worrying much finding the nearest AC outlet to plug your AC adaptor to charge your machine. However, Samsung is claiming that this baby can last up to 7.2 hours, which is something that we hope is true and we are wrong. Crossing our fingers, Samsung!

This machine is more than great for business but the price is too steep for just the usual surfing and documents. It is powerful and the design makes it premium but unless you are willing to burn a lot of cash you can get more powerful machines with the price tag this one has.