14 DAY TRIAL // Just a day after the world learned about the impending decision to leave optical drives out of ultrabooks, Samsung has announced a DVD writer designed specifically for them, as well as slates.
For those that haven't heard about it yet, HP, Dell and ASUS have reportedly decided to make ultrabooks (super-thin and light notebooks) without optical disk drives.
The necessary thinness of the laptop is not the only cause behind this decision. The companies are trying all they can to reduce the prices of these things too.
Then again, an ODD only adds $20 / 15 Euro, so this might not be the best of ideas.
At any rate, we saw yesterday that Samsung was more than ready for an era of optical-drive-less notebooks.
What we are really going to focus on here is the fact that this SE-218BB external DVD writer works just fine with tablets too.
Advertised as the drive that “sets the industry standard for ultra portable drives,” it is the thinnest external ODD, at 14mm height, 18% thinner than conventional DVD writers.
“Through its AV connectivity mode, the drive is also ideal for Tablet PC users that want to view or hear content from a disc,” said Maverick Choi, ODD senior manager, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.
Android 3.1 Honeycomb, and later versions, are supported, so now we may as well try to figure out why anyone would get something like this when the whole point of slates is that you can take them along without needing anything else.
Obviously, the fact that Samsung's ODD still allows you to travel light is the main selling point here. Slipping the ODD in the small travel bag you hold your tablet in when going somewhere is easy. The price isn't all that humongous either, at $59.99 (45.36 Euro, exchange rates suggest).
On the flip side, this might be a nice answer, or at least the first sign of one, to the issue of too many trade-offs that Apple's CEO invoked when arguing that there was no way touch-enabled laptops would ever threaten tablets.