ativbook92014edition
Latest
Samsung ATIV Book 9 2014 Edition review: big screen, even bigger price
So many Ultrabooks in our laptop buyer's guide: Not one with a 15-inch screen. Which is strange, because it seemed for a while that bigger-screen ultraportables were going to become a thing; HP, Sony and ASUS all tried their hand at super-light 15-inch machines. Two years later, though, Samsung is one of the only companies that's still at it. The company recently came out with the ATIV Book 9 2014 Edition, an update to the 15-inch Series 9 laptop from 2012. Like the original, it's insanely thin and light for a machine with this screen size, except now, it graduates to a full HD touchscreen, longer battery life and updated processors. Most notable of all, it features an improved audio setup with a built-in digital-to-analog converter allowing you to play back lossless, or "studio-quality" audio formats. The thing is, even for a flagship it's pretty expensive: At $1,500, it has one of the highest starting prices we've seen, and there are plenty of similarly specced machines that cost less. That raises an interesting question, then: Who should buy this?
Samsung updates its 15-inch ATIV Book 9 Ultrabook with touch, a higher-res screen and lossless audio
Samsung launched its 13-inch ATIV Book 9 Plus Ultrabook with so much fanfare that it was easy to overlook the not-so-good news: The 15-inch Series 9 wasn't getting any updates. In fact, you can still buy it today, but with last year's Ivy Bridge chip and a 1,600 x 900 screen that doesn't support touch. Great deal, right? Finally, though, Samsung is catching up: The company just announced a new version, the ATIV Book 9 2014 Edition, which ushers in an updated design and more current specs. Of note, Samsung made the screen slightly bigger, stretching it from 15 inches to 15.6, and boosted the resolution to 1,920 x 1,080. That might come as a bit of a disappointment to some, given that the 13-inch version has a 3,200 x 1,800 screen, but Samsung notes that ultra-high-res screens in larger sizes aren't exactly easy to come by. So maybe you'll see that in the next-next-gen version. For now, at least, the screen is a bit brighter (300 nits vs. 250 in last year's model) and you also get a regular HDMI port this time, as opposed to a micro-sized one. As you can imagine, the addition of the touchscreen, plus that slightly larger footprint, means the ATIV Book 9 is a good deal heavier -- four pounds and 0.63 inch thick, versus 3.5 pounds/0.58 inch on last year's model. The battery size is the same as ever, but thanks to Intel's newfangled Haswell processors, runtime is now rated at 14 hours, up from 10. Samsung hasn't revealed pricing yet, but we do know there will be at least two configurations: a Core i5 model with a 128GB SSD, and a Core i7 version with 256GB of storage.
