Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Review

In the past year, the price of solid-state discs has halved, and more and more laptops are emerging with SSDs instead of hard disk drives. But at £600 is it finally time to throw away the clunky old Toshiba and replace it with something new? Graeme Burton examines the new Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite

Just last month, we looked at the Gigabyte U2442F, a £1,000 "ultrabook" with a stonking Intel Core i7 microprocessor, an excellent, dedicated 2GB NVIDIA graphics card - and a truly terrible screen.

We noted not only that it seemed unbalanced - marrying a fab graphics card capable of playing Crysis 2 at maximum resolution with a non-touch screen that looked like it had been pinched from a cheap Acer laptop - but that it seemed a steep price to pay for a laptop with a rather modest, 128GB solid-state disc (SSD).

And lo-and-behold, what should turn up next than something (at least superficially) similar for half the price - about £500 for the non-touch-screen version and £600 for touch. But how does it measure up in real-world usage, and does it offer value for money compared to other devices at around the same price?

Starting on the outside, Samsung has eschewed the temptation to try and make its device look like a Macbook and instead designed a laptop that looks pretty good, but different. It is thinner, but not lighter, and has some elegant curves holding the screen hinge in place. The "mineral black ash" (ie: black) version looks particularly smart, in our opinion. It is also available in white.

There are two versions of the ATIV Book 9 Lite - touch and non-touch.

We reviewed the touch screen version as Windows 8 seems a bit pointless (and even more annoying) without a touch screen. It offers a standard resolution of 1366 by 768 over 13.3 inches, but is bright and colourful with reasonable (but not spectacular) viewing angles considering its price - it's certainly better than the Gigabyte U2442F in that respect. The speaker, too, is decent enough for the price and more than adequate for watching BBC iPlayer.

Inside, it sports a quad-core AMD A6-1450 budget microprocessor, together with an integrated AMD HD 8250 graphics processing unit (GPU). It comes with 4GB of memory, although the Control Panel suggests you have just 3.44GB to play with, and up to 2GB of this will be shared with the GPU. And, no, in true Apple iPad-style none of this is expandable or replaceable unless you're willing to get out the Phillips screwdrivers, crack open the case, invalidate your warranty and hope for the best.

The keyboard is another chiclet-style affair, but much quieter than the Gigabyte's, while the mouse pad is good for zipping around the screen (when not using touch), but the buttons on the pad can be both unresponsive and finickity. For example, right-clicking to bring up a menu frequently registered as a left click/select. The buttons are also built under the track pad, which could also be awkward when manipulating the pointer while the finger is hovering on the button.

Furthermore, it has no features for fast scrolling, which is disappointing, nor any option to turn the touch pad off. While it commendably doesn't interfere too often with touch-typing, which is an indication of good ergonomics, it can sometimes relocate the cursor mid-type with predictably irritating results.

In action

Downloading the initial software we needed to test the machine - Opera, Adobe Flash, Steam, benchmarks etc - we found it disconcertingly unresponsive and, frankly, slow for a laptop with an SSD. It could take up to 10 seconds for simple dialog boxes to appear when, for example, we were installing Flash.

Indeed, saving data took, in our estimation, five times longer than loading it, and searching for even quite simple things took even longer. To be fair to Samsung, search under Windows 8 can be truly appalling. For example, we conducted a search for the streaming games application Steam, while it was running - yet Windows 8 drew a blank.

Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite: Review

In the past year, the price of solid-state discs has halved, and more and more laptops are emerging with SSDs instead of hard disk drives. But at £600 is it finally time to throw away the clunky old Toshiba and replace it with something new? Graeme Burton examines the new Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite

Windows SmartScreen also crashed while installing Libre Office and when it came round we found it trying to install Libre Office four times. So, not a great start. Likewise, Steam failed to install properly first time round.

In large part, though, all these are minor quibbles. It turns on exceptionally quickly either from "sleep" or from "off" and in everyday use it's a very pleasant device to use: nippy enough for web browsing, document authoring or spreadsheet manipulating, while competent for viewing You Tube and other streaming media applications.

The battery life, too, is good - not exceptional, but certainly adequate: you can safely bank on five hours of battery life on mundane office applications and we got six hours out of it in our completely unscientific road test. For ad hoc, on-off work it ought to last the day with a bit to spare - provided you don't work too hard. However, when the battery fades, as all must do over time, replacement will involve unscrewing and cracking open the case.

The AMD microprocessor at the heart of this machine is cryptically billed as "quad core", with no clues as to exactly what it is, which we feel is quite misleading. It took some investigation to work out exactly what device it is that your money is paying for. The A6-1450 budget microprocessor from AMD actually runs at a standard 1GHz, and its benchmark score, according to CPUBenchmark.net, weighs in at 1,659, while Catzilla pegged it at a less-than-respectable 469.

What that means is that you shouldn't expect it to play any games released in the past five years or so particularly well. Indeed, we tried it with both Serious Sam HD, which proved acceptable, and Crysis 2, which was too slow to be playable. However, it has the trial/freeware version of Plants versus Zombies thrown in as standard, which runs speedily enough.

However, watching fast action films or television is a bit of a sickly experience and BBC iPlayer was not entirely smooth either and blurry on fast-action sequences. Wi-Fi was competent, but with the single antenna the range was good rather than spectacular - note to potential laptop buyers, if you want really good Wi-Fi range, get a device with dual antenna.

Overall, though, this is a very nicely packaged device. It's well made, slim and weighs in at just 1.5 kilos, making it easy to slip into the bag and carry around. The battery life is just about okay and, if it's not good enough for you, even the transformer is small and dinky. As such, it's a great device for light office work on the move.

However, it does seem more like a grown-up netbook - and expensive netbook at that in view of the components inside. Furthermore, with SSD prices dropping fast there's no reason why laptops at this price point - £600 - shouldn't soon be sporting more capacious and useful 256GB SSDs.

In addition, we wonder why Samsung was so cagey about revealing exactly what microprocessor the ATIV9 sports. A cynic would say that it is because the AMD A6-1450 is a very budget processor, as reflected in the disappointing benchmarks. Indeed, at this price, you could pick up a full-fat laptop and, if you can do without an SSD, touchscreen and Windows 8, you can get yourself something pretty powerful.

That leads us to feel that this device is a more than a touch overpriced and we wouldn't be surprised if £100 or more were lopped off the price after Christmas, and the 128GB SSD swapped for a 256SSD soon after that. It is, nevertheless, a competent, well thought-out device, handy for working on the move, and light and smart, too.

Rating: 3/5

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