The existing Series 9 customers wanted something bigger, and this undeniably is. It shares much in common with the 13.3in variant: the keyboard feels very similar to type on, with the main benefit being slightly more space for keys such as Home, Page Up and Down, and End.

The touchpad is even larger: it almost feels like a graphic tablet in terms of its size, and if Microsoft can add better gesture support in Windows 8 this could lend the 15in Series 9 a real advantage.

The screen shares some of the same characteristics as its 13.3in brother, most notably a slight hue as you move off-centre, but there’s no graininess here. With 1,600 x 900 pixels, we’d be very happy to use this as our everyday machine.

Samsung packs enough power in, too, with a Core i7 processor inside (hopefully Ivy Bridge when it arrives). Note that Samsung has not yet confirmed specs, prices or any release date.

One potential annoyance is the reliance on adapters for connecting to Ethernet and VGA; also note it’s a micro-HDMI slot rather than full-size. We’re pleased to see a full-size SD card slot, two USB 3 slots on the right-hand side, plus USB 2 on the left. There’s no Thunderbolt, though.

As with the 13.3in Series 9, the battery is designed to last for 1,500 lifecycles; that means it should still have 80% of its capacity even after four or five years, by which time it will definitely be time to give this laptop to someone else anyway.

Samsung claims a ten-and-a-half hour battery life, too, but as with the 13.3in version we’ll have to wait for the review samples to put this to the test.

The Series 9 is no such laptop. It looks and feels beautiful, with what Samsung terms as a “mineral matt-finish”. The end result is no fingerprints on the lid, which was one of the big complaints consumers had with the original Series 9.

And it’s helped along by an ultra-sleek chassis, with Samsung going all-out with its marketing hype: this, folks, is the world’s slimmest laptop. Or to be more precise, the 13.3in version of the Series 9 is, measuring a ridiculous 12.9mm thick. (See our preview of the 15in Series 9 here.)

Unlike so many laptops, as can be seen from the photo above, that claim this kind of girth it doesn’t gain much extra towards the back.

Then there’s the weight of 1.16kg. We’re now used to high-powered laptops being featherlight, but even so the Series 9 is exceptional.

The payback comes with the ports. This 13.3in model has one USB 3 port on the right and a USB 2 port on the left, plus a full-size SD slot neatly tucked into the side of the chassis, but aside from this you’re slipping into the world of micro and adapters: there’s a micro-HDMI port on the left, an adapter for Ethernet and VGA, plus one 3.5mm socket (usable for either a microphone or headphones).

Samsung doesn’t make too many compromises with the keyboard. Naturally there isn’t a massive amount of travel on the keys, but we got up to a decent speed (this review is actually being typed directly onto a showfloor Series 9) and didn’t notice much clatter. Yes, the Enter key is single-height, but it’s also nice and large – as is the excellent touchpad.

We’re a little less enamoured by the screen. This uses a Samsung LED panel that’s been custom-made by Samsung itself, and it suffers from a very slight grain. If you go a little off-centre, it also develops a slight yellow hue.

In practice, though, we don’t think we’d complain. For a start there’s minimal glare from the screen’s matte finish; and second, it’s very bright at full whack: 400cd/m² according to our man on the stand.

Perhaps even more important is the resolution: Samsung packs in 1,600 x 900 pixels into this 13.3in display, yet it doesn’t feel squashed or cramped.

This gives it a full notebook feel, and it’s helped further by a Core i7 processor – the exact spec has yet to be confirmed. Samsung is making bold claims about wake times too: 1.8 seconds from sleep, 9.8 seconds from off. Our tests didn’t quite bear this out, with the pre-production sample on show taking around 13 seconds (see the video below).

The final thing to note is the battery. Being a unibody chassis, sculpted from aluminium, the battery is built-in and there’s no option for replacement.

If Samsung is to be believed, however, this shouldn’t be an issue, because the battery is designed to last for 1,500 recharges before it loses 20% of its capacity. This compares, Samsung claims, to 300 recharges for a typical laptop.

Hopefully that means you’ll still have at least 80% of the original capacity after five years; Samsung claims the 13.3in Series 9 lasts for six-and-a-half hours.

It adds up to a laptop with a lot of promise, and we look forward to Samsung confirming the launch date – and price – in the coming weeks.

What immediately sets it apart is its size. The P Series can literally slip into a jacket pocket – I know because I’ve done it. It’s also incredibly light, just 638g. Even the lightest netbooks tend to tip the scales over 1kg.

It’s partially a sign of the netbook form factor’s impact then that we consider the price of £849 inc VAT expensive, but what really hurts is that in the US the same model will cost $900 (before sales tax). Sony puts the blame for the high price squarely on the strength of the dollar and yen compared to the weak pound, but it will certainly limit the notebook’s appeal.

Then again, two years ago our jaws would have been dropping to the floor that Sony had created such an innovative product for less than a grand. There are a number of technologies inside to help justify the price too. You get a built-in 3G modem, plus draft-n wireless, Bluetooth and GPS. And unlike netbooks, which almost all use the cheaper N270 Atom, the P Series includes a higher-cost (albeit lower speed) 1.33GHz Z520.

Together with 2GB of RAM, this proved sufficient to run the supplied Vista Home Premium at a decent pace. It’s fine for word processing and web browsing, but we certainly wouldn’t want to use the P Series as our main PC.

Another reason why it’s no PC substitute is the keyboard. It looks great, but we struggled to get used to it when typing. For instance, we found it difficult to hit the tiny Shift key on the right hand side, and also kept on accidentally hitting the wrong key when aiming for the spacebar. Before we write the P Series off, though, we’ll wait until we can get a system in for a full review, as it could just need a slight adjustment to typing style.

There’s no room for a trackpad, so Sony opts for a trackpoint instead. Although this proved accurate and responsive, hitting system dialog buttons did prove a pain – we’d be tempted to adjust the display settings to make system dialog boxes bigger.

When admiring photographs or fiddling with spreadsheets, there’s no denying the 1,600 x 768 screen is fantastic. Considering that it measures just 8in diagonally across, it’s something of a coup just to squeeze that much detail in there.

When you pick it up, this also feels like a bit of luxury. Compared to the PC Pro A-Listed Samsung NC10, which is undoubtedly one of the best built netbooks around, with the P Series it’s clear you’re holding something of real quality.

Sony claims a battery life of 4hrs from the standard battery (though one Sony spokesperson we spoke to said 3hrs), and this can be doubled by buying an extended battery. While not groundbreaking, that’s still good enough battery life for almost all-day use.

So we have mixed feelings about the P Series. It’s undoubtedly a fine piece of engineering and it looks great, but – judging from our limited time with it so far – it’s not the most usable of laptops. And at this price, it could struggle to gain mass appeal.

What sets it apart, though, is its superb range of wireless connections, its style, its build quality, and the fact you can slip it into a pocket – or handbag – so easily. We’ll bring you a full review later this month, which will be just in time to buy it as the P Series goes on sale in the UK in early February.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/01/09/hands-on-sony-vaio-p-series/feed/ 9 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/11/19/just-in-zoostorm-netbook/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/11/19/just-in-zoostorm-netbook/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:26:47 +0000 Tim Danton http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=4302 We often get a first look at products before they hit the shelves, but this is a first – right now, the “Zoostorm Netbook” doesn’t even have an official name. What we do know is that companies like Argos are already showing an interest, and from the couple of days we spent with the Zoostorm we suspect they’ll sell quite a few.

The bad news is that you’ll have to wait to buy one: PC Nextday, the company behind the Zoostorm brand, won’t be putting them on sale until the second week of January. Unlike the Fizzbook, Zoostorm’s first and ongoing foray into netbooks, which was based on Intel’s Classmate PC and aimed squarely at children, this is a unique design that it’s created in partnership with a third-party manufacturer.

And more importantly, it aims to set new benchmarks for what you can expect for the price.

In particular, it will be the first netbook in the UK that offers draft-n wireless for under £275 – the Zoostorm will probably go on sale for £219 inc VAT. Right now, the cheapest draft-n netbook we can find is the Medion Akoya, a 10in offering based on the PC Pro award-winning MSI Wind, but that costs a significant £60 more.

Aside from its cutting-edge wireless chip, the Zoostorm harks back to what netbooks were originally intended to be. Cheap and cheerful, while offering all the features most people need. In this case, that includes Windows XP Home. It uses the netbook-omnipresent 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, with 1GB of RAM for company in our sample – though it’s possible this may drop to 512MB.

Its 8.9in screen is again typical fare for a netbook. It isn’t of the very highest quality, with the tell-tale sign of slight graininess, but it’s both bright and well saturated. Photos will never impress a photographer, but when browsing the web or tapping away at a document it’s absolutely fine.

We’re less enthralled by the keyboard. Inevitably cramped, Zoostorm exacerbates things by not using the full width of the chassis, and it also makes several compromises to usability. The apostrophe has been relegated to the bottom row next to the cursor keys, while the right Shift bar has been sacrificed altogether. In combination with the inevitably small keys, this rules out speedy typing for all but the nimblest touch typists.

The small touchpad is another mixed blessing. Until I trained myself not to, my fingers were brushing against it while typing, sending the cursor all over the page in the process. It’s designed to integrate in with the chassis, which keeps things looking neat, but it’s small.

The design itself is pretty good. Apple won’t be losing any sleep, but the Zoostorm’s all-white design inside looks surprisingly upmarket, while the black lid has a sheen of gloss. It doesn’t look cheap and nor, when it comes to build quality, does it feel it.

This makes it a strong contender to be slung into a bag, and considering it weighs just 995g on our scales (many netbooks that claim they’re under 1kg are actually a few grams more) that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Battery life isn’t exceptional – it lasted for 3hrs 20mins in our light-use tests – but because its power demands are low Zoostorm can get away with a small, all-in-one power supply. And that makes it exceptionally easy to squeeze into a bag.

So, there are plenty of promising signs here. The only cloud on the horizon is that the likes of Dell, HP and – if the rumours are to believed – even Sony are targeting their big corporate and marketing guns at the netbook market.

What could make things very interesting, though, is that the signs are that international vendors like Dell are keen to keep prices towards and beyond the £300 mark. Which leaves quite a lot of space for the likes of PC Nextday to operate in.

At first glance, there’s very little to distinguish the R600 from the R500, but the devil is in the detail. For one, Toshiba has strengthened the base – protecting the all-important motherboard – by adding ridges for extra rigidity.

It also claims to have made the screen better protected, with Toshiba’s interesting spin being that the lid’s flexibility – which might initially make people feel that the R600 is a bit fragile – actually increases its reliability. Certainly we gave it a good old flex and it stayed in shape, which is fortunate as this was the one European sample.

But the really big enhancement is to communications. There’s now embedded 3G mobile broadband which, along with a claimed battery life of up to eight hours – with an extended battery – and an astonishing weight of 779g, makes this a highly attractive laptop for mobile professionals.

As with the R500, you can also use it outside. There’s a transflective LED display, and by pressing a single button you can make it feasible to use outside on a sunny day. The keyboard is a pleasure to use too. All the keys are large and easy to hit, with a responsive feel – this is one obvious area where it’s superior to the cheaper Portégé A600.

It’s powered by an Intel ultra-low-voltage U9400 CPU, but as we’ve come to expect from the company’s latest processors it’s still a powerful machine. We’ll wait until we’ve put the R600 through our usual benchmarks, but there’s no obvious reason why most people couldn’t use this as their main PC.

Toshiba hasn’t yet confirmed prices or exact specifications for the UK, but we know the R600 will come with the option of no optical drive or with one integrated into the chassis (adding around 200g to the weight). We also know it will be priced at roughly the same price as the R500, so approximately £1,000 exc VAT.

We’ve been assured we’re top of the list for when full review samples become available, so keep an eye out on PC Pro reviews within the next two to four weeks – which is also when the R600 is likely to go on sale.

The wrist-rest, for instance, is clad in leather, and there’s a gilded Lambo logo on the lid – just so people on the train know that you’ve spent £1,500 on such a quality product. The laptop itself is housed in a smart box and then, inside that, a plush velvet bag. Even the included Bluetooth mouse comes with a little pouch all of it’s own, and there’s a leather-coated mousepad to compliment it, too – and that’s also adorned with the Lamborghini logo.

One feature, though, really takes the cake: the webcam. Now, I know it’s not unusual for laptops to include webcams, but this one comes with a little added value. There’s a card in the box, bordered with floral flourishes, that explains how the webcam is, well, a little bit special.

You see, it’s coated with sapphire crystal. For its own protection, allegedly – as it’s second only to diamond in the Mohs scale, which measures the toughness of natural materials. It’s for the webcams protection, allegedly, although standard webcams do seem to be getting along fine without such an extravagent coating. There’s even a warning: don’t you dare go scratching the webcam with one of the many diamonds that you’re likely to have hanging around, as it’s the only substance likely to damage the precious lense. There’s even an extra warning – don’t strike the webcam with ‘big force’, as you’ll damage it. Thank god for translation.

As I type this, the office has become mesmerised by yet another feature of the Lambo: the sound affects. We’ve discovered that when it boots up, the Lamborghini-flavoured Asus actually makes car noises. Here’s the revving engine, in all of its glory:

The Asus Lamborghini VX3

I have to admit that no-one in the office was aware that a Core 2 Duo T9300 made those sorts of noises.

We’ll have a full review of this remarkable – and, no doubt, expensive – machine up by tomorrow, so be sure to check back and see what we think of this intriguing piece of engineering.

It was a bit of a whirlwind romance to be fair, love at first sight and why shouldn’t it have been? The Eee is thin, pretty and most importantly cheap – pretty much my ideal date. Only thing is, success has turned its head. Suddenly, with the release of the Eee PC 900, it’s not so cheap anymore and if it carries on gorging on additional tech, it’s not going to be so thin either.

All in all, I think somebody needs to sit down with Asus and explain that its baby doesn’t need a bigger screen. It doesn’t need a bigger chasis, it doesn’t need more memory or a higher price tag. There are plenty of other laptops around for that, and yet the uncomfortable feeling persists that while everyone else gets giddy about tiny, cheap laptops, Asus, almost perversely, intends on taking the Eee the other way.

And when it does, expect a very messy break up.