It doesn't drive native resolution, only 1/4 of it (much like Apple's retina displays). 3200x1800p = 4 x the resolution of the standard 1600x900p so everything scales perfectly (mostly text; with software , images also render at native resolution) even though the GPU is technically only driving 900p (for the most part).
While the effective size of the elements on screen is equivalent to 900p, as an example, the number of pixels the GPU has to drive is indeed 4x. So the GPU is technically driving all of the pixels. What the user sees is icons and such that look the same in size as the resolution they're used to, but everything is super sharp - which is how retina/hi-dpi works these days.
Actually you have it backwards, the idea of retina or HiDPI display is to always try to render programs at the larger resolution and scale them down to fit on the screen.
Apple GUI elements are either vectorial or bitmaps elements being rendered at 4x the pixels (or with high resolution bitmaps), then scaled down to fit the surface they would on a 900p and the parts of applications using pictures or movies try to run those at their natural resolution. Look at the MBPro retina reviews on this site.
The only apps that tend to upscale lower graphics are games for obvious reasons (even super high end GPUs like the Titan are barely able to rend at 2560x1440), but even then you can chose the native resolution and it's up to the dev to maybe scale part of their graphics or resources to optimise speed (on the iPad some games do render at 1/2 the res and let Apple, then specific, hardware scale up).
You're half right. Apple downscales only for non-standard resolutions. It downscales for all the other resolutions apart from 1400x900(half of 2800x1800) which is the optimal retina mode on the rmbp 15".
Windows does not need to render at resolutions above those supported by the panel and downscale thereafter; this means that it will never suffer performance penalties due to pre-rendering routines like OSX.
That's not how it works. Doing that would be useless. The GPU in fact drives the full physical resolution of the display. What they mean when they say the effective res is 1/4, is that the elements on the screen are sized as big as they would be on a screen that was 1/4 the res, but the same size. Rendering the elements at 4x the res is what gives you that sharpness.
There's no problem in 2D, the specifications are identical, and performance all up to drivers. Just in 3D its a problem. The problem in Notebooks/Ultrabooks at least in the current models, is that using resolutions lower than the native sucks. On my XPS 12, using 1366x768 resolution rather than 1920x1080 would mean the whole screen real estate would shrink. What's the point of that?
The reason running 1366x768 resolution on a 1920x1080 display is that one rendered pixel = 1.5 displayed pixels. The only way to do this that makes sense gives you horrible blurring.
Running 1600x900 resolution on a 3200x1800 display gives you one rendered pixel = 4 displayed pixels. No blurring needed and it looks sharp. You can test it by running games in 960x540 on your 1920x1080 display. It will probably look a lot better than 1366x768.
You can run a monitor at half, one third and a quarter of it's (vertical) resolution and still get sharp (but less detailed) pictures. In other words, on a 3200x1800 display you could run your games at 1600x900, 1066x600 and 800x450 and get sharp (but less detailed) images.
You completely missed my point. My point being that 1600x900 on a 3200x1800 screen looks just as good as 1600x900 on a 1600x900 screen. This is not the case for 1366x768 on a 1920x1080 screen.
As a rule I knock a third off any official battery life given for a product. It's a rule that works for a worrying number of devices, but you never know, Haswell might make all the difference.
No, the 15" rMBP has a discrete nvidia chip. I think you mean the 13" rMBP which has an Intel HD4000 GPU. This Samsung has 1.4X the pixels of the rMBP and a slightly more powerful Intel HD4400 GPU. Many are waiting for the Haswell 13" rMBP as the current rev. struggled with graphics performance if you recall Anand's review last year.
Yeah but the graphics kernel and desktop composition in Windows is lightyears ahead of what is in OSX. I highly doubt haswell will have trouble composing the screen even at this resolution. Haswell should be capable of driving 4K displays with ease.
Very well for typical 2D applications, I would assume. My ancient computer from early 2006 (Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2GB DDR, 7600GT) ran Windows 7 Beta (with Aero) very smoothly at 2560x1600.
Haswell can easily drive this res perfectly fine. It's not exactly hard. Don't know why idiots keep saying crap like this you should know better. Obviously gaming at native res will be impossible but no ones going to do that.
You mean the MacBook Air with 1440x900 right? The Retina MacBook Pro has a 2560x1600 display.
But yeah, this laptop is a beast. I'm still really interested how they can get 12 hours of battery life with a display this dense if Apple gets 12 hours with a mere 1440x900 display.
Yeah that's another thing I'm really interested in: the price. Top of the line Ativ 9 looks to be about $1699, so I can't see this being any less than that. Which also means this is out of my budget and I'd probably be better off with a MacBook Air Haswell at this point I guess.
If you are on a budget why would you spend $1100 on a notebook that has a dated display? There will be dozens of choices of horrible display laptops that last for 12 hours in the next few months. And they will cost half as much.
The battery life is (maybe) 12 hours because the screen is probably an IGZO display. They are reputed to draw significantly less power than current displays.
In response to: Still, 1600x900 is better than rMBP 1440x900.
To keep the same physical height, a 1600x900 screen needs to be 14.4" diagonal, not 13.3". With the same diagonal, 13.3" 16x9 screen has 7.5% less physical height, which makes similarly rendered letters harder to read. Or, with the same physically-sized letters, you get 7.5% fewer vertical lines of text.
The Office Ribbon can be positioned only at the top and it eats a lot of vertical space. The browsers have tabs, menus, etc., too. Document authoring and text reading convenience got sacrificed for not having horizontal black bars when watching widescreen movies.
13.3" 16:10 = 11.2 x 7.05 (MBA) 14.4" 16:10 = 12.5 x 7.06 (to keep the same physical height) 13.3" 16:9 = 11.5 x 6.52 (ATIV - 7.5% less physical height, only 2.7% more physical width)
Very nice. I too would have liked 16:10 and GT3, but let's be honest nothing is going to meet my exact preferences. I think the GPU would spend most of its time in games @ 16x9.
Just makes me cry because if I want 16:10 I have to go Apple. Basically it will depend on pricing between this, Zenbook Infinity, and Haswell rMBP. While I do love the Series 9's industrial design, the rMBP and Zenbook will almost certainly have 28W GT3e SKUs, so despite the slightly higher res, Samsung will have to have a compelling story on both price and battery life (certainly 12hr claim is impressive).
Me too. Wishing there were some decent 16:10 Windows machines now days.
Also, who made the Chromebook Pixel. If they would offer that with a Windows installation (and decent HDD and RAM) I would try the 3:2 ratio. Anything taller than 16:9 has to be an improvement.
Wow, this is the type of display I was hoping refreshed MacBook Air models would have :-)
As far as I can tell, this Samsung laptop is now in the #1 spot on the pixel density leaderboard: http://pixensity.com/list/laptop/ with HP, Fujitsu and Google Pixel following closely behind and the 13" MBPr coming in 5th or so... of course pixel density isn't everything but it sure doesn't hurt.
Any word when Anandtech will have one of these bad boys to review? Definitely exciting times in the laptop arena! :-)
Unless this laptop has a ridiculously better body, screen or trackpad, the zenbook infinity seems to be a much better deal. For a 13.3" screen, I'd imagine a 2560x1440 would be more than sufficient to get the retina effect. Toss in the fact that the zenbook has a much more powerful integrated gpu (5100) and I don't understand what Samsung is doing...
I want a 1600x900 screen at 13" at least. That's what I have right now, it's absolutely perfect, although it's 13.1" (Vaio Z) not 13.3". So that doubled up is 3200x1800.
You don't *have* to go with an even divisor of the native resolution when you have a display with that high of a DPI. I run my 15 inch rMBP in 1680x1050 which is 0.555x the native resolution of 2880x1800. Yeah it's not even scaling but I cannot see any obvious artifacts even if I look very closely.
1600x900 on a native 2560x1440 display is 0.625, which is very similar to 1920x1200 on my 2880x1800 display (0.666) and it looks just as fine to me.
Engadget has claimed that both Ativ Books have an excellent trackpad, Apple-like in fact, just like the previous gen Ativ 7 they reviewed; but who cares about the trackpad when you have a touchscreen in your face.
That's good news. The trackpad is the first thing I test out when looking for a laptop. Apple nearly perfected the trackpad and makes the majority of other designs feel like you are metaphorically walking through water instead of air.
Anyone that's actually gonna work would care, reaching over the keyboard constantly is still an awkward situation (and I say that based off experience with my ASUS Transformer), and busting the mouse out isn't always practical or even an option. Personally I detest pads regardless of whether it's Apple's or not, but a touchscreen is an even poorer substitution (outside of tablet mode or the like obviously).
The main reason for wanting this screen over the Zenbooks is that non-HDPI apps look better when scaled by an integer factor and the ATIV Book 9+ gives 1600x900 instead of 1280x720; giving both HDPI and high effective resolution to have a decent amount of stuff on the screen at the same time.
And as for the GPU, HD 5100 is only available in a 28W TDP package; vs 15W for lesser IGPs. This should give the Samsung significantly better battery life. I do however stand with the people hoping the i7 model has HD5000 graphics (lower clocked GT3).
Yeah I know the 12 hour battery life figure is crazy good and I'm sure people have use cases for it but I'd be okay with much better graphics horsepower and "only" 8-10 hour battery life (assuming the zenbook infinity can deliver that). It's not like my smartphone where the battery drains fast in a poor connection when i need it to be always on. For me, worst case scenario with a laptop is maybe I want to take a cross country flight and want to watch a few movies or play some games en route. If I can get a solid 5-6 hours with heavy usage or 8-10 hours with light, I'd be pretty happy with that.
If Samsung is accurate on their battery life claims then the MacBook Air is going to have much tougher competition than it has had in years, though arguably the Sony VAIO Z two years ago was the best of the pre-ultra book rivals. Advantage Air: Probably still better keyboard & touchpad, Maybe fractionally better battery life?, Thunderbolt (really small advantage until market for accessories & monitors goes somewhere), PCIe SSD: Specwise a big advantage but not that much in the real world, SSD read speed is becoming less and less of a performance chokepoint, especially for desktop usage.
Advantage Samsung HUGE screen advantage. So what if the GPU has trouble driving it in 3d, this is an ultrabook not a gaming rig, Sexier industrial design (it's thinner, lighter & newer than the MacBook Air). From a sales perspective it is so much easier to sell big flashy things like that screen than the possibility that the Thunderbolt market might actually turn into something
"it's thinner, lighter & newer than the MacBook Air"
Lighter, really? Seem you should check your facts. The Samsung thing weights 3.06 pounds while the MBA weights 2.96 pound. Still think that it's lighter?
Thinner? Hum... I don't think so. The Samsung thing is 0.54 inches while the MBA is 0.11-0.68 inches. You have to be quite a Samsung lover to claim that the Samsung thing is thinner. Overall, the MBA is indeed thinner.
Sexier industrial design? Newer than the MacBook Air? Really? As far as I can see it and you must be quite blind not to see it, the Samsung thing is just an MBA design knock-off (like Samsung always does and anyone buying their stuff should feel ashamed) with a slightly modified shape and a different color. A knock-off of something can't be newer or more sexy than the original because it's just a knock-off after all.
"Maybe fractionally better battery life". Really? I have never seen a Samsung device that fulfills Samsung claims on battery life. They often throw a number out of an unrealistic test case and right now they had to throw 12 hours if they didn't want to feel embarrassed in front of the MBA. In fact I don't believe one second that this thing can reach something even close to 12 hours with such amount of pixels (which are here just for marketing) and with a GPU way more stressed to drive them (GPU which is by the way not powerful enough to do so hence the marketing resolution). It has maybe a bigger battery as it's heavier and thicker than the MBA, but I don't think it's enough.
"Thunderbolt (really small advantage until market for accessories & monitors goes somewhere)". Really. You would have said the entire opposite if Thunderbolt would be present in the Samsung thing. Suddenly having a super fast connection technology is not relevant, when in fact you find already today on the market a lot of PCI chassis, video and audio devices, mass storage drives ready for Thunderbolt. You don't see it because you don't want to or because being on pc, you haven't noticed that the market is already moving fast towards Thunderbolt. Now you may say ah yeah but those are professional gears. Well maybe, Thunderbolt is for speed otherwise use USB. But it remains that Thunderbolt is today a big advantage if you want to use your laptop for you know real work, not as a toy.
"PCIe SSD: Specwise a big advantage but not that much in the real world, SSD read speed is becoming less and less of a performance chokepoint, especially for desktop usage." Really? Again you would have said the complete opposite if the Samsung thing was built with PCIe SSD. Now suddenly performance does not matter, yes sure nice try! And your claim about SSD read speed becoming less important is total non sense. It's more relevant than ever in fact.
"From a sales perspective it is so much easier to sell big flashy things" Yes sure flashy thing that is an unbalanced computer in terms of performance (slow GPU that can't really handle the number of pixels, false claims on battery life to hide the negative impact of the screen resolution on real world battery life, no fast connections) that has this screen resolution for the sole reason of marketing purposes. And you would be mistaken to judge this screen on resolution alone when color accuracy is also very important and don't expect too much in that regard with this Samsung thing.
Here is my advise. If you want an ultra book that offers no compromise on performance and battery life, that is designed to be very fast (GPU capabilities consistent with the screen resolution, fast CPU, very fast connectivity, fast wireless with 802.11ac Wifi ac and Bluetooth 4.0 ) and for real work, buy a MBA.
If you are looking for a MBA knock-off that has a ton of pixels with a GPU too slow to drive them, poor real world battery life, and which runs a toy OS that is a total mess and frustrating to use (yes I am talking about Windows 8), then spend you money with Samsung. But you being a fool.
Samsung makes the PCIe SSDs in Apple's recent MBA. What makes you think these devices made by Samsung don't have PCIe SSDs ? Sony's latest Vaios also sport PCIe SSDs. Here's a hint, according to Cnet, this unit boots in 6 seconds and wakes up in 1 second. Surely the SSD has some role in it and not just Windows8.
What makes you think it does? It's a SATA M.2 SSD according to the product number showing up in Device manager. It's not that a huge difference between a SATA 6Gbps SSD and a AHCI PCIe x2 SSD, PCIe allows for grater bandwidth, but AHCI/SATA-commands still limits other aspects.
Vaio Z is heroic. There's still no clear successor. Bias: I have Sony Vaio Z12 (Intel Core i5-520M 2.4 GHz, 8GiB RAM, 2x 64GB SSD RAID0, Geforce 330M GT 1GiB)
The fact that they'd bundle a 3200x1800 equipped laptop with a micro-HDMI port boggles my mind. That becomes such an awful decision the moment you want to hook up a HiDPI external display.
Nothing less than mini-DP should be acceptable here.
Nice screen, but piss-weak CPU/GPU. That basically ruins it. I don't care too much about battery life as such - but give me Haswell with at least Iris 5100, or it's kind of a bust..
If there is anything to complain about it is the non-upgradeable 4GB of RAM.. that is truly bad... it should have 8 or 16 at least. And I can't tell, but it looks like only HDMI and USB3 ports? No Displayport makes me go something something.....
I was excited about this until I saw it was just an HD4400 graphics card on that chip. It would require an upgrade to an i7 with an hd5000 or possibly even iris (say hello to at least $200 more for what will already be a grossly overpriced ultrabook, given samsung's MSRPs...)
I'm just excited to see that notebooks like these are going to provide the kick in the pants we need to have proper DPI scaling from developers creating applications in Windows.
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Emyr - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
So this has a weaker GPU driving almost 4.5X the pixels of the 13" MacBook Air. How's that going to work?Qbancelli - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Wait and see.w_km - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
It doesn't drive native resolution, only 1/4 of it (much like Apple's retina displays). 3200x1800p = 4 x the resolution of the standard 1600x900p so everything scales perfectly (mostly text; with software , images also render at native resolution) even though the GPU is technically only driving 900p (for the most part).chucknelson - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
While the effective size of the elements on screen is equivalent to 900p, as an example, the number of pixels the GPU has to drive is indeed 4x. So the GPU is technically driving all of the pixels. What the user sees is icons and such that look the same in size as the resolution they're used to, but everything is super sharp - which is how retina/hi-dpi works these days.Jammi - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
That's not how Apple's retina displays work.Torrijos - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Actually you have it backwards, the idea of retina or HiDPI display is to always try to render programs at the larger resolution and scale them down to fit on the screen.Apple GUI elements are either vectorial or bitmaps elements being rendered at 4x the pixels (or with high resolution bitmaps), then scaled down to fit the surface they would on a 900p and the parts of applications using pictures or movies try to run those at their natural resolution. Look at the MBPro retina reviews on this site.
The only apps that tend to upscale lower graphics are games for obvious reasons (even super high end GPUs like the Titan are barely able to rend at 2560x1440), but even then you can chose the native resolution and it's up to the dev to maybe scale part of their graphics or resources to optimise speed (on the iPad some games do render at 1/2 the res and let Apple, then specific, hardware scale up).
ananduser - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
You're half right. Apple downscales only for non-standard resolutions. It downscales for all the other resolutions apart from 1400x900(half of 2800x1800) which is the optimal retina mode on the rmbp 15".Windows does not need to render at resolutions above those supported by the panel and downscale thereafter; this means that it will never suffer performance penalties due to pre-rendering routines like OSX.
ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, June 22, 2013 - link
That's not how it works. Doing that would be useless.The GPU in fact drives the full physical resolution of the display. What they mean when they say the effective res is 1/4, is that the elements on the screen are sized as big as they would be on a screen that was 1/4 the res, but the same size. Rendering the elements at 4x the res is what gives you that sharpness.
IntelUser2000 - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
There's no problem in 2D, the specifications are identical, and performance all up to drivers. Just in 3D its a problem. The problem in Notebooks/Ultrabooks at least in the current models, is that using resolutions lower than the native sucks. On my XPS 12, using 1366x768 resolution rather than 1920x1080 would mean the whole screen real estate would shrink. What's the point of that?blackbrrd - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
The reason running 1366x768 resolution on a 1920x1080 display is that one rendered pixel = 1.5 displayed pixels. The only way to do this that makes sense gives you horrible blurring.Running 1600x900 resolution on a 3200x1800 display gives you one rendered pixel = 4 displayed pixels. No blurring needed and it looks sharp. You can test it by running games in 960x540 on your 1920x1080 display. It will probably look a lot better than 1366x768.
You can run a monitor at half, one third and a quarter of it's (vertical) resolution and still get sharp (but less detailed) pictures. In other words, on a 3200x1800 display you could run your games at 1600x900, 1066x600 and 800x450 and get sharp (but less detailed) images.
bji - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Upscaling from 1600x900 to 3200x1800 would hardly look "sharp". I can't even imagine how un-sharp 800x450 scaled up to 3200x1800 would look.blackbrrd - Saturday, June 22, 2013 - link
You completely missed my point. My point being that 1600x900 on a 3200x1800 screen looks just as good as 1600x900 on a 1600x900 screen. This is not the case for 1366x768 on a 1920x1080 screen.Alketi - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
It works because this isn't a gaming machine. I'm more interested to see if you can really get 12 hours of battery life out of it.Alfinch - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
As a rule I knock a third off any official battery life given for a product. It's a rule that works for a worrying number of devices, but you never know, Haswell might make all the difference.xdrol - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
It has 11% more pixels than the 15 inch rMBP, with a 25% better GPU (at least).Emyr - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
No, the 15" rMBP has a discrete nvidia chip. I think you mean the 13" rMBP which has an Intel HD4000 GPU. This Samsung has 1.4X the pixels of the rMBP and a slightly more powerful Intel HD4400 GPU. Many are waiting for the Haswell 13" rMBP as the current rev. struggled with graphics performance if you recall Anand's review last year.inighthawki - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Yeah but the graphics kernel and desktop composition in Windows is lightyears ahead of what is in OSX. I highly doubt haswell will have trouble composing the screen even at this resolution. Haswell should be capable of driving 4K displays with ease.bji - Saturday, June 22, 2013 - link
Evidence? I don't believe your statement but I guess we'll know when high resolution Haswell based laptops are tested.madmilk - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Very well for typical 2D applications, I would assume. My ancient computer from early 2006 (Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2GB DDR, 7600GT) ran Windows 7 Beta (with Aero) very smoothly at 2560x1600.ShieTar - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Same here. Even my old Notebook with an nVidia 440 Go never had a problem to feed the 2560x1600 resolution.MatthiasP - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
I definitely hope they will put the HD 5000 in some of the models.B3an - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Haswell can easily drive this res perfectly fine. It's not exactly hard. Don't know why idiots keep saying crap like this you should know better. Obviously gaming at native res will be impossible but no ones going to do that.ImmortalSamurai - Thursday, July 4, 2013 - link
It's MAGIC! #jazzhands #glitterw_km - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
What they should have made is a 4K monitor and sold it for $2000. Talk about potential profits...a--holessilenceisgolden - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Really disappointed that this isn't 16:10. Otherwise I would have no doubts about getting one.Alketi - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
I am too. Still, 1600x900 is better than rMBP 1440x900.I'm also expecting we'll see a number of 1920x1080 Haswell options coming.
BRImpulse - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
You mean the MacBook Air with 1440x900 right? The Retina MacBook Pro has a 2560x1600 display.But yeah, this laptop is a beast. I'm still really interested how they can get 12 hours of battery life with a display this dense if Apple gets 12 hours with a mere 1440x900 display.
Alketi - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Wrong resolution, but I meant the Pro.2560x1600, you're right, which is even worse because its "native" resolution is 1280x800.
This thing is a beast. I don't see how it sells for less than $1600.
karasaj - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
I believe the battery in the MBA is much smaller.BRImpulse - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Yeah that's another thing I'm really interested in: the price. Top of the line Ativ 9 looks to be about $1699, so I can't see this being any less than that. Which also means this is out of my budget and I'd probably be better off with a MacBook Air Haswell at this point I guess.kleos44 - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
If you are on a budget why would you spend $1100 on a notebook that has a dated display? There will be dozens of choices of horrible display laptops that last for 12 hours in the next few months. And they will cost half as much.kleos44 - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
The battery life is (maybe) 12 hours because the screen is probably an IGZO display. They are reputed to draw significantly less power than current displays.1d107 - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
In response to: Still, 1600x900 is better than rMBP 1440x900.To keep the same physical height, a 1600x900 screen needs to be 14.4" diagonal, not 13.3". With the same diagonal, 13.3" 16x9 screen has 7.5% less physical height, which makes similarly rendered letters harder to read. Or, with the same physically-sized letters, you get 7.5% fewer vertical lines of text.
The Office Ribbon can be positioned only at the top and it eats a lot of vertical space. The browsers have tabs, menus, etc., too. Document authoring and text reading convenience got sacrificed for not having horizontal black bars when watching widescreen movies.
13.3" 16:10 = 11.2 x 7.05 (MBA)
14.4" 16:10 = 12.5 x 7.06 (to keep the same physical height)
13.3" 16:9 = 11.5 x 6.52 (ATIV - 7.5% less physical height, only 2.7% more physical width)
(7.05 - 6.52) / 7.05 = 7.5%
(11.5 - 11.2) / 11.2 = 2.7%
http://www.silisoftware.com/tools/screen.php was used to calculate screen dimensions.
FwFred - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Very nice. I too would have liked 16:10 and GT3, but let's be honest nothing is going to meet my exact preferences. I think the GPU would spend most of its time in games @ 16x9.teiglin - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Just makes me cry because if I want 16:10 I have to go Apple. Basically it will depend on pricing between this, Zenbook Infinity, and Haswell rMBP. While I do love the Series 9's industrial design, the rMBP and Zenbook will almost certainly have 28W GT3e SKUs, so despite the slightly higher res, Samsung will have to have a compelling story on both price and battery life (certainly 12hr claim is impressive).pixelstuff - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Me too. Wishing there were some decent 16:10 Windows machines now days.Also, who made the Chromebook Pixel. If they would offer that with a Windows installation (and decent HDD and RAM) I would try the 3:2 ratio. Anything taller than 16:9 has to be an improvement.
coolhardware - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
Wow, this is the type of display I was hoping refreshed MacBook Air models would have :-)As far as I can tell, this Samsung laptop is now in the #1 spot on the pixel density leaderboard:
http://pixensity.com/list/laptop/
with HP, Fujitsu and Google Pixel following closely behind and the 13" MBPr coming in 5th or so... of course pixel density isn't everything but it sure doesn't hurt.
Any word when Anandtech will have one of these bad boys to review? Definitely exciting times in the laptop arena! :-)
p1esk - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link
It's going to be a tough choice between Acer S7, Asus Infinity and this one. Unless Apple updates rMBP 13" in the next 3 month.Connoisseur - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Unless this laptop has a ridiculously better body, screen or trackpad, the zenbook infinity seems to be a much better deal. For a 13.3" screen, I'd imagine a 2560x1440 would be more than sufficient to get the retina effect. Toss in the fact that the zenbook has a much more powerful integrated gpu (5100) and I don't understand what Samsung is doing...piroroadkill - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
I disagree that 2560x1440 is enough.I want a 1600x900 screen at 13" at least. That's what I have right now, it's absolutely perfect, although it's 13.1" (Vaio Z) not 13.3". So that doubled up is 3200x1800.
bji - Saturday, June 22, 2013 - link
You don't *have* to go with an even divisor of the native resolution when you have a display with that high of a DPI. I run my 15 inch rMBP in 1680x1050 which is 0.555x the native resolution of 2880x1800. Yeah it's not even scaling but I cannot see any obvious artifacts even if I look very closely.1600x900 on a native 2560x1440 display is 0.625, which is very similar to 1920x1200 on my 2880x1800 display (0.666) and it looks just as fine to me.
ananduser - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Engadget has claimed that both Ativ Books have an excellent trackpad, Apple-like in fact, just like the previous gen Ativ 7 they reviewed; but who cares about the trackpad when you have a touchscreen in your face.pixelstuff - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
That's good news. The trackpad is the first thing I test out when looking for a laptop. Apple nearly perfected the trackpad and makes the majority of other designs feel like you are metaphorically walking through water instead of air.Impulses - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Anyone that's actually gonna work would care, reaching over the keyboard constantly is still an awkward situation (and I say that based off experience with my ASUS Transformer), and busting the mouse out isn't always practical or even an option. Personally I detest pads regardless of whether it's Apple's or not, but a touchscreen is an even poorer substitution (outside of tablet mode or the like obviously).DanNeely - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
The main reason for wanting this screen over the Zenbooks is that non-HDPI apps look better when scaled by an integer factor and the ATIV Book 9+ gives 1600x900 instead of 1280x720; giving both HDPI and high effective resolution to have a decent amount of stuff on the screen at the same time.DanNeely - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
And as for the GPU, HD 5100 is only available in a 28W TDP package; vs 15W for lesser IGPs. This should give the Samsung significantly better battery life. I do however stand with the people hoping the i7 model has HD5000 graphics (lower clocked GT3).Connoisseur - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Yeah I know the 12 hour battery life figure is crazy good and I'm sure people have use cases for it but I'd be okay with much better graphics horsepower and "only" 8-10 hour battery life (assuming the zenbook infinity can deliver that). It's not like my smartphone where the battery drains fast in a poor connection when i need it to be always on. For me, worst case scenario with a laptop is maybe I want to take a cross country flight and want to watch a few movies or play some games en route. If I can get a solid 5-6 hours with heavy usage or 8-10 hours with light, I'd be pretty happy with that.VengenceIsMine - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
If Samsung is accurate on their battery life claims then the MacBook Air is going to have much tougher competition than it has had in years, though arguably the Sony VAIO Z two years ago was the best of the pre-ultra book rivals.Advantage Air:
Probably still better keyboard & touchpad, Maybe fractionally better battery life?, Thunderbolt (really small advantage until market for accessories & monitors goes somewhere), PCIe SSD: Specwise a big advantage but not that much in the real world, SSD read speed is becoming less and less of a performance chokepoint, especially for desktop usage.
Advantage Samsung
HUGE screen advantage. So what if the GPU has trouble driving it in 3d, this is an ultrabook not a gaming rig, Sexier industrial design (it's thinner, lighter & newer than the MacBook Air). From a sales perspective it is so much easier to sell big flashy things like that screen than the possibility that the Thunderbolt market might actually turn into something
hakime - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
"it's thinner, lighter & newer than the MacBook Air"Lighter, really? Seem you should check your facts. The Samsung thing weights 3.06 pounds while the MBA weights 2.96 pound. Still think that it's lighter?
Thinner? Hum... I don't think so. The Samsung thing is 0.54 inches while the MBA is 0.11-0.68 inches. You have to be quite a Samsung lover to claim that the Samsung thing is thinner. Overall, the MBA is indeed thinner.
Sexier industrial design? Newer than the MacBook Air? Really? As far as I can see it and you must be quite blind not to see it, the Samsung thing is just an MBA design knock-off (like Samsung always does and anyone buying their stuff should feel ashamed) with a slightly modified shape and a different color. A knock-off of something can't be newer or more sexy than the original because it's just a knock-off after all.
"Maybe fractionally better battery life". Really? I have never seen a Samsung device that fulfills Samsung claims on battery life. They often throw a number out of an unrealistic test case and right now they had to throw 12 hours if they didn't want to feel embarrassed in front of the MBA. In fact I don't believe one second that this thing can reach something even close to 12 hours with such amount of pixels (which are here just for marketing) and with a GPU way more stressed to drive them (GPU which is by the way not powerful enough to do so hence the marketing resolution). It has maybe a bigger battery as it's heavier and thicker than the MBA, but I don't think it's enough.
"Thunderbolt (really small advantage until market for accessories & monitors goes somewhere)". Really. You would have said the entire opposite if Thunderbolt would be present in the Samsung thing. Suddenly having a super fast connection technology is not relevant, when in fact you find already today on the market a lot of PCI chassis, video and audio devices, mass storage drives ready for Thunderbolt. You don't see it because you don't want to or because being on pc, you haven't noticed that the market is already moving fast towards Thunderbolt. Now you may say ah yeah but those are professional gears. Well maybe, Thunderbolt is for speed otherwise use USB. But it remains that Thunderbolt is today a big advantage if you want to use your laptop for you know real work, not as a toy.
"PCIe SSD: Specwise a big advantage but not that much in the real world, SSD read speed is becoming less and less of a performance chokepoint, especially for desktop usage." Really? Again you would have said the complete opposite if the Samsung thing was built with PCIe SSD. Now suddenly performance does not matter, yes sure nice try! And your claim about SSD read speed becoming less important is total non sense. It's more relevant than ever in fact.
"From a sales perspective it is so much easier to sell big flashy things" Yes sure flashy thing that is an unbalanced computer in terms of performance (slow GPU that can't really handle the number of pixels, false claims on battery life to hide the negative impact of the screen resolution on real world battery life, no fast connections) that has this screen resolution for the sole reason of marketing purposes. And you would be mistaken to judge this screen on resolution alone when color accuracy is also very important and don't expect too much in that regard with this Samsung thing.
Here is my advise. If you want an ultra book that offers no compromise on performance and battery life, that is designed to be very fast (GPU capabilities consistent with the screen resolution, fast CPU, very fast connectivity, fast wireless with 802.11ac Wifi ac and Bluetooth 4.0 ) and for real work, buy a MBA.
If you are looking for a MBA knock-off that has a ton of pixels with a GPU too slow to drive them, poor real world battery life, and which runs a toy OS that is a total mess and frustrating to use (yes I am talking about Windows 8), then spend you money with Samsung. But you being a fool.
inighthawki - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Lol you are a funny one sir...iamezza - Sunday, June 23, 2013 - link
derpingwe - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
I like Apple and think their products work really well for some usage scenarios, but calm down man.ananduser - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Samsung makes the PCIe SSDs in Apple's recent MBA. What makes you think these devices made by Samsung don't have PCIe SSDs ? Sony's latest Vaios also sport PCIe SSDs. Here's a hint, according to Cnet, this unit boots in 6 seconds and wakes up in 1 second. Surely the SSD has some role in it and not just Windows8.Penti - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
What makes you think it does? It's a SATA M.2 SSD according to the product number showing up in Device manager. It's not that a huge difference between a SATA 6Gbps SSD and a AHCI PCIe x2 SSD, PCIe allows for grater bandwidth, but AHCI/SATA-commands still limits other aspects.piroroadkill - Thursday, July 4, 2013 - link
Vaio Z is heroic. There's still no clear successor.Bias: I have Sony Vaio Z12 (Intel Core i5-520M 2.4 GHz, 8GiB RAM, 2x 64GB SSD RAID0, Geforce 330M GT 1GiB)
Aho - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
A shop named LambdaTek has the base model listed at £1102.68...not too bad I suppose...Ryan Smith - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
The fact that they'd bundle a 3200x1800 equipped laptop with a micro-HDMI port boggles my mind. That becomes such an awful decision the moment you want to hook up a HiDPI external display.Nothing less than mini-DP should be acceptable here.
piroroadkill - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Nice screen, but piss-weak CPU/GPU. That basically ruins it. I don't care too much about battery life as such - but give me Haswell with at least Iris 5100, or it's kind of a bust..Mondozai - Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - link
Moronic statement. Unless you need to do gaming(why?), you dont need Iris graphics.daviderickson - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
If there is anything to complain about it is the non-upgradeable 4GB of RAM.. that is truly bad... it should have 8 or 16 at least. And I can't tell, but it looks like only HDMI and USB3 ports? No Displayport makes me go something something.....Jocelyn - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
There is an 8GB RAM/256GB SSD option ;)sherlockwing - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
It is soldered on LPDDR3 Ram, not user upgradeable DDR3L Ram.ingwe - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
No. That is the MBA that you are thinking about. The article says that it is DDR3L...mssoftmind - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
On the left side of the notebook are connectors USB 3.0, microUSB adapter for connection to RJ45, micro-HDMI and a card reader.http://www.myelectronicproduct.com/samsung-ativ-bo...
davinleeds - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
I prefer:http://www.myelectronicproduct.com/samsung-ativ-q-...
Gabik123 - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
I was excited about this until I saw it was just an HD4400 graphics card on that chip. It would require an upgrade to an i7 with an hd5000 or possibly even iris (say hello to at least $200 more for what will already be a grossly overpriced ultrabook, given samsung's MSRPs...)Guess the Zenbook Infinity it is!
hfm - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
I'm just excited to see that notebooks like these are going to provide the kick in the pants we need to have proper DPI scaling from developers creating applications in Windows.dwade123 - Sunday, June 23, 2013 - link
Yeah right...like people will actually use such a POS Android when they have the choice to use a real full fledge OS.ESC2000 - Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - link
I haven't been able to figure out whether the ativ book 9 plus will be available with an i7 haswell processor and/or 8 GB of RAM... Does anyone know?