back to article Samsung Ativ Book 9 Lite: 13.3-inch slimline notebook with a secret

It seems an odd paradox that the more a company tries to hide something, the more publicity it attracts. Apple certainly uses this notion to good effect, knowing that it can't keep those secrets indefinitely, but also knowing that when it eventually lifts its kimono, what's new in the garden customarily causes a commotion among …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Windows 8?

    :sad face:

    Still, as it isn't ARM, something else can be installed. Shame it would still count as a Windows sale.

    The search continues!

    1. dougal83

      Re: Windows 8?

      NP900X4C find one of those with windows 7 and you're golden. Much better than Macbook Air IMO. You'll read reviews that its screen in not premium(lower res. than others) but I like to be able to read text on screen when the laptop is on my lap so I bought it and never looked back. Higer res on a 15 inch screen is pointless, *looks at Apple.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Windows 8?

        £875???? Sod that!

      2. TheRealRoland

        Re: Windows 8?

        i just received a Samsung lativ book 8. also win8, but quad core i7, dedicated rad eon graphics, 15inch touch screen. comes standard with 8gb, had an additional 8 installed. full HD screen. while not enough vertical pixels, it's now very easy to run several bigger VMs on it. the only bottleneck is the cheapo 5400 rpm 1TB drive...

        About $1300 with the extra ram.

        weird thing about these hybrid laptops - split personality; sometimes touch is easier, other times mouse.

        Very funny when going back to other laptop, and catching myself touching the screen but nothing happens :-)

  2. Efros

    Too much moolah for too little performance.

    500 quid, they're pulling your leg shurely!

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Too much moolah for too little performance.

      After a short moment of temptation I noticed that the RAM is soldered. So Sammy has intentionally crippled perfectly good hardware (this APU can take 16G per DIMM slot of normal DDR3). The situation with the drive is less clear - specs list it as SATA3 so there may be some chance to replace it with something more decent like a 1TB hybrid drive.

      For example my considerably older and less powerful Sony 11 incher (using E series APU) has 16G already and will get 32 once the 16G DIMMs become common place. Default spec lists it as 4G Max. The situation is the same with all AMD APUs - if the vendor BIOS has not crippled this in order to provide "fair" competitive advantage for Intel offerings, they will eat as much memory as you will give them.

      If it had upgradeable memory I would have gotten it straight away (I actually need memory for my stuff). However as it is non-upgradeable, sorry - no buy.

  3. GregC

    Interesting and then disappointing....

    Started off thinking this could be a nice replacement for my ageing netbook, but then saw the price, OS and battery life...

    If they did one without the touchscreen (and passed on the relevant saving in the price)*, either with Win7 or no OS, I might be interested. If they put a better battery in too they'd probably have a sale.

    * This is something I'm getting increasingly annoyed by. I don't want a touchscreen on a laptop/netbook, and I don't want to pay a premium for something I'm not going to use. At the moment I'm struggling to find anything to replace the aforementioned netbook.

    1. Professor Clifton Shallot

      Re: Interesting and then disappointing....

      Does anyone know what the premium on having a touchscreen is?

      I don't want Windows 8 but I don't suppose I would particularly mind a touchscreen sitting there unused as long as it hadn't cost me anything significant in the first place.

      Are they so ubiquitous these days that they don't add anything much to the price?

    2. Alex Walsh

      Re: Interesting and then disappointing....

      I replaced my netbook with a Asus TF300 Transformer. Since I mostly used my netbook for blogging and websurfing, so far android hasn't been too limiting. And of course there's the 18 odd hours of battery with the dock. You can pick them up for £225 if you shop around (or at least you could a month ago).

  4. handle

    "heat sync"?

    What happened to the error reporting button?

  5. Mark #255

    no "context-menu button"

    Disappointing that Samsung couldn't fit a context-menu button into the keyboard (on full-size keyboards it's just to the right of the right Windows key).

    On laptops I often find that, working without a mouse, it's far easier to bring up the context menu with a dedicated button, rather than [find cursor], [drag cursor to correct part of screen], [click right trackpad button].

    But other than that, meh. Wrong OS, too pricey, unwanted touchiness, two weird ports too many.

    1. Colin Miller

      Re: no "context-menu button"

      Shift-F10 should work in most MS-Windows programs; it's been there since Windows 3.1.

      1. Professor Clifton Shallot

        Re: no "context-menu button"

        Thanks, Colin, I didn't know that! (In my defence I do have a context menu button on my keyboards).

  6. Steve Knox
    Thumb Up

    HomeSync

    "One of them looked rather hopeful as a DropBox option, but it turns out that Samsung's HomeSync Lite is more like having a NAS with remote access for Galaxy devices rather than a SkyDrive or similar."

    A manufacturer NOT trying to force all of their customers' content onto some unspecified dodgy server "in the cloud"? What is the world coming to?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And another HD resolution laptop

    13.3" LED HD (1366 x 768) -> http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/pcs/NP915S3G-K02US

    Yawn.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    "Does it run Linux?"

    I wonder how many commentards will have read this far before posting "Does it run Linux?", but I digress.

    Pesky Linuxtards don't have to "read this far" as we know too well that any mention of "does it run Linux" are reserved for the last page of a review.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Does it run Linux?"

      The problem of "Will it run Linux" is in most cases, only temporary in nature. ;-)

  9. ramblog

    Screen Tilt is good!

    Once in a while, if in a foul mood, my 2 year likes to step on the keyboard and push the screen away, much like in the picture.

    So far a HP and a Dell have had their hinges broken in a way that they have to be kept permanently open and am unable to source the chassis parts.

    So guess this is a feature that I will gladly take.

    1. Danny van der Weide

      Re: Screen Tilt is good!

      This kind of problems can be sold with a good stick...

      But don't apply it to your laptop!

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