Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook Review

Vishal Mathur

Well, we wouldn’t blame you for being confused about whether this is a slim laptop, or is it really an ultrabook. The presence of the optical drive may tilt the opinion in the favour of the former! Whichever way it is, we are delighted at having such a slim notebook to carry around.

Look & Feel
Despite a tapered design towards the one end of the machine, the Series 5 doesn’t come across as an ultrabook usually would. However, it looks extremely classy, and being understated probably helps it more than ever. The grey matte aluminum finish doesn’t catch fingerprints, dust and scratches like glossy surfaces do. Why, when laptop manufacturers can do this, do they bother with the glossy finish on laptops?

The optical drive is placed on the right side, and even that has a dual layered design. However, try picking up the laptop, and you risk accidentally popping it open. There is a USB port and the card reader, but popping open the card reader isn't a very elegant exercise! On the other side are two USB 3.0 ports as well as HDMI, Ethernet and even a VGA port and a combined port for headphone and mic.

While this is essentially a mid-range ultrabook in the logic of ascending numbers, Series 5 falls between the budget Series 3 and the ultra classy Series 9. The build quality and materials used are better what we expected, quite frankly. But it isn't the HP Folio, and it’ll be wrong to expect it to be that. It feels considerably solid, and since it is quite slim, you can fit it into any bag. Surprisingly, not very light though, which proves what we had been saying all along - this is a slim laptop masquerading as an ultrabook.

Features & Performance
Just as with the price and the build quality, Samsung has kept the mid-range theme intact with the choice of processor. This is an Intel Core i5-2467M, from the Sandy Bridge family, which is a minimum requirement of the ultrabooks. This is paired with 6GB of RAM, which really helps shuffle the performance among. The performance throughout is quite good, and the laptop doesn’t slow down even with multiple browser tabs, music playback and even a Word document open in the background. The fact that this has 6GB of RAM against the standard 4GB that we have been seeing on laptops, is a critical factor. Essentially, the Series 5 is competing against the Acer Aspire S3, and does have the performance advantage on it throughout. Just for your reference, we have a table with the benchmark scores compared.

The version that we got for review did not have an SSD, but instead had a 1TB HDD. Not that we mind, since this negates the need to carry around an external hard drive with you. However, what you do miss out on is the 25 second Windows boot times. However, if you are going to copy what that Macbook user on the next workstation does, and just close the lid to put the machine to sleep, you will be impressed with the near instant resume speeds. The 16GB Express Cache is what makes all the difference. When compared to the Acer Aspire S3, the hard drive on the Series 5 is slightly faster as well, as you can see with the quick copy times in the 4GB data transfer test.

Visit page two, to read more about the Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook's Features & Performance, as well as Our Verdict... 

Do also read our comparison feature, where we compare four of the latest Ultrabook models in India, based on their reviews:

Ultrabooks comparison: 4 latest models reviewed