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The Samsung Series 7 Ultra first showed its face at CES in January, and all kinds of hands-on videos sprouted up on the net showing off this potential big-time contender. Now that we've gotten it in our labs and run our tests on it, here's our full review.
With the Series 7 Ultra, Samsung is hoping to snatch some major market share from Apple and Asus, who have plotted a nice, cushy place for themselves in the high-end ultrabook and ultra-portable laptop market. With a 13.3-inch Full-HD PLS touchscreen, a solid-state drive and a gorgeous aluminium body, the Series 7 Ultra has all the chances in the world to succeed in robbing customers from its rivals.
Design
The all-aluminium chassis is elegant, but perhaps not quite as prestigious as its Apple counterpart. The keyboard contours are matte grey and don't easily get smudged or dirty. Both the screen and its contours, however, are glossy.
The backlit chiclet keyboard has four levels of brightness. The touchpad is standard size and easy and enjoyable to use; it recognises all the Windows 8 multitouch gestures, like zooming with two fingers, scrolling horizontally and vertically and flipping between open apps.
The multipoint touchscreen is precise and responsive. Double-clicking a folder or file in "list" mode in Windows Explorer can be just as tricky as always on a touchscreen, but that's more likely an issue with Windows 8 and the screen resolution than poor touch response. Of course, as usual with Windows 8, once you leave the Start screen—which is most of the time—there really isn't much point to the touch capability.
The Series 7 Ultra has just about all the connectivity you could need: three USB ports (two USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0), an Ethernet RJ45 port, an HDMI port, a VGA out (that requires an adapter that is not included), a headphone/microphone combo jack and an SD card reader. The only thing missing is a DVD drive. If an optical drive is an absolute necessity for you, then a reasonable alternative might be the Dell Inspiron 14z or the HP Envy 4. Or you can just buy an external drive for £50 or so.
Display quality
Like all touchscreens, the Series 7 Ultra's Full HD display is glossy. Sadly, the brightness only goes up to 295 cd/m². This means that outside, especially in the sunlight, you'll get glare and reflections. But everything else about the screen is great. The PLS panel has 900:1 contrast and broad viewing angles from every direction.
Grey colour temperature
Gamma
Delta E
With a Delta E (which measures the difference between how colours are supposed to look and how they actually appear onscreen) of just 3.2, colours look precisely as they should. A Delta E of 3.2 is excellent and rare, especially in the world of notebooks, where you can find some of the worst laptop screens on the market.
Processor Power
The Intel Core i5-3337U processor makes the Series 7 Ultra a fast laptop that's capable of running a wide variety of applications. On average, takes about 10% less time to execute a task an Intel Core i5-3317U. Even so, a Core i7, which has four cores instead of the Core i5's two, would be even faster with programmes optimised to distribute the workload among the four cores.
Windows 8 and the 128 GB solid-state drive make for a highly responsive machine that takes fifteen seconds to start up and less than ten to shut down. That said, 128 GB isn't much. You'll need to get an external hard drive or cloud storage if you want more space.
Gaming
Unlike the Series 5, which has a dedicated AMD video card, the model of the Series 7 Ultra that we tested (see inset) has nothing but a little Intel graphics chipset. It decodes HD movies perfectly well, but video games are another story. The only thing you'll get to run fluidly on this model is older games or new ones that require very little GPU power.
This is not a good news for gamers.
Battery Life
With a barely 1.85-cm-thick body that weighs 1.6 kg and a 13.3-inch screen, the Series 7 Ultra fits easily into a handbag or backpack. And with five hours of battery life (tested with continuous video playback in airplane mode, the screen brightness at 100 cd/m², headphones plugged in and the keyboard backlighting turned off), it's a good laptop to carry around.
Conclusion:-
Finally, an ultrabook that can rival the Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A and Apple MacBook Air. The Samsung Series 7 Ultra has processing power, battery life, a quality screen, beautiful finish and tons of connectivity. That said, they shouldn't have even bothered with the touchscreen, because it doesn't add much to the user experience—all it does is add to the price and drag down the battery life. Otherwise, this is definitely a keeper!
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