The Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus is an ultrabook with an Intel Haswell processor, a thin and light design, and a 13.3 inch screen. It’s that screen that really makes the notebook stand out: The ATIV Book 9 Plus has a 3200 x 1800 pixel touchscreen display.
Samsung introduced the ATIV Book 9 Plus in June, but conveniently forgot to mention a price or release date.
Now it’s available for pre-order in the US. Adorama is taking orders for $1398, and B&H is asking $1400. The notebook is expected to ship around August 20th.
Update: Samsung says the ATIV Book 9 Plus officially goes up for pre-order on August 18th, although that doesn’t seem to be stopping some stores from taking orders early.
That’s a lot of money for a notebook, but good luck finding another laptop with this kind of display resolution for a lower price.
The rest of the specs are pretty much what you’d expect from a decent ultrabook, including a 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5-4200 Haswell processor, 4GB of memory, and a 128GB solid state drive.
Samsung’s ultrabook also features 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetoogh 4.0, Intel WiDi wireless dispaly technology, Gigabit Ethernet (with an adapter), and an SDXC card reader.
The notebook measures 12.5″ x 8.7″ x 0.5″ and weighs about 3.06 pounds.
If you’re looking for something cheaper, the ATIV Book 9 Lite is already available in the US for around $800. That model has a 1.4 GHz AMD A6 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, but it has a lower-resolution 1366 x 768 pixel display, weighs 3.5 pounds and measures about 0.7 inches thick.
via Engadget
Samsung missed in several important areas, which will keep me holding out for Asus’ Zenbook Infinity:
1) They use the plain Haswell chip without IRIS (HD-5100/5200) GPU. And as we found out from earlier benchmarks, the HD-4400 is almost as slow as the old HD-4000. (HD-4000=16eu, HD-4400=20eu, HD-5100=40eu)
2) 4GB RAM have already been an ugly limitation on previous Series 9 models. Now that there are plenty of options with 8GB, this is not acceptable, even though I normally like Samsung’s gear. (yes, 8GB is not only for geeks or gamers, it helps windows not to wear our your SSD early, with less swapfile use when multitasking simple things like browsers, word processors, spreadsheets for normal office work)
3) The redesign of the rear end, holding the display hinge, has taken the elegance out of the design and turned it into something odd. Opening the display to 180 degrees could have been achieved without giving it an ugly upturned burzel.
For comparison:
Asus has clearly stated that the Zenbook Infinity will come with IRIS GPU and 8GB. It can’t be that long anymore either, since its already on sale in Australia now.
Soldered ram, or upgradeable?
1400$ is a lot and only having 4gb of RAM is rather silly, not even dual dimm? Pathetic.
Can’t really understand what is the point in having so high res on a notebook screen. I would rather have a full hd screen and a one hour longer battery life.
Most of the power is taken up by the backlight of the display, not by the pixels. I believe Sharp’s IGZO displays use no more power than a regular display.
A 3200×1800 (1800p) display actually does have benefits an FHD panel lacks: you can run it at 1600×900 resolution, which combines 4 pixels into one without any scaling artifacts, depending on what you need to do.
If you want to work in Photoshop, you’d keep it running at 1800p. If you want to use SolidWorks or play a 3D game, you’d switch it to 900p to avoid overtaxing the GPU.
.
Lastly, if your eyesight isn’t the best anymore and you can’t see the difference anyway, you’d always keep it in 900p or simply buy an older model Series 9 with the 900p display.
320 x 1800? Those dimensions would look like a bunch of Atari 2600 game console graphics smushed together ! 😀
EDIT: Obvious typo is now fixed, obviously.