14 DAY TRIAL // The past week has seen the official introduction of ultrathin notebooks that will ship from October 26 onwards, but they are as disappointing as they are impressive, a description that Samsung's 13-inch Series 5 Ultra Touch may escape.
Some time ago, we learned that market watchers and analysts expected $750 / 750 Euro to become the “standard” price of ultrabooks this quarter (Q4 2012).
Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be the case. Due to special design elements, SSD storage and whatever else, Windows 8 ultrathins ended up selling for $1,000 / 1,000 Euro on average. Again.
Acer's 15.6-inch Aspire M5-581T is the only exception we've found, with its tag of $750 / 750 Euro.
Even Windows 8 tablets are suffering from high prices, something that analysts agree on.
Thus, it is with trepidation that we have ended up in a position where we can describe the $809.99 / 809.99 Euro price of the Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch as reasonable.
The use of a hard disk drive instead of an SSD has a lot to do with this apparent feat. While 24 GB of ExpressCache memory do exist (SSD integrated in the motherboard), the actual storage unit is a 500 GB HDD.
The native resolution of the screen (1366 x 768 pixels HD instead of 1920 x 1080 pixels Full HD) contributed as well.
The rest of the feature set is the same as everywhere else though: a Core i3 or Core i5 ($50 /50 Euro extra cost) central processing unit is backed by 4 GB of DDR3 RAM (random access memory), a 10point multitouch panel covers the LCD, the sides of the laptops are designed with various ports, etc.
Finally, the weight is of 3.83 pounds, or 1.73 kilograms, give or take. Not exactly the lightest Windows 8 ultrabook out there, but still decent for a 13-inch laptop with a magnetic storage drive.