Samsung Ativ Book 9 Lite review

We’re used to Samsung churning out premium-priced Ultrabooks and high-end smartphones, but the ATIV Book 9 Lite bucks the trend. This is a slim, svelte laptop that promises an Ultrabook-like experience on the cheap.

If you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve seen the ATIV Book 9 Lite before, there’s a good reason for that: the DNA of Samsung’s legendary Series 9 range of Ultrabooks is evident in every curve and chamfer of this cut-price laptop. Squint slightly and it’s easy to mistake it for its far pricier predecessor. The Lite is finished in the same dark blue – although there is a more eye-catching white model, if that takes your fancy – and everything from the teardrop hinge design to the scrabble-tile keyboard echoes Samsung’s top-end model.

Inevitably, Samsung has had to make some major compromises to get the price so low. The first casualty is materials. Where the Series 9 was hewn from solid-feeling metal, the ATIV Book 9 Lite has to make do with plastic. It’s good, sturdy-feeling plastic, though, and while there’s a little flex to be found if you force the lid and base, this is a seriously solid-feeling laptop for the money. It’s attractive by budget standards, too. While the lid has a fake brushed metal effect with a glossy finish, the interior and underside are all finished in an attractive matte blue.

The ATIV Book 9 Lite also isn’t as thin or light as many of the Ultrabooks we’ve seen. It’s 6mm thicker than Samsung’s Series 9 – including the rubber feet on the base, the Lite measures 19mm thick – and, rather ironically given its name, it weighs a fairly hefty 1.55kg. Thankfully, the fairly compact mains charger doesn’t add too much to the weight: throw both in a bag and the pair come to a very reasonable 1.88kg.

At the heart of the ATIV Book 9 Lite, an AMD processor takes pride of place – though curiously you’d be unable to tell it from the specification on the box, or from delving through Windows 8’s Device Manager. The CPU is described mysteriously simply as a “Quad-Core Processor (up to 1.4GHz)”, with no manufacturer or model name to be found. The presence of an AMD Radeon HD 8250 GPU gives the game away, however, as it’s an integral part of AMD’s A6-1450 APU, which is partnered here with a 128GB Samsung PM841 SSD and 4GB of DDR3 RAM.

It’s a combination that feels perfectly spritely in casual use, with applications loading and opening quickly. When we recorded the time taken to restart the system, the Lite arrived back at the Start screen in 25 seconds. That’s a testament to the PM841: while it doesn’t rival top-flight SSDs for all-out speed, it generated some impressive figures in the AS SSD benchmark, reading large files at an average of 481MB/s and writing them back at a less notable 108MB/s.

When it comes to hard work, however, the ATIV Book 9 Lite struggles. The A6-1450’s four cores run at a slow 1GHz, boosting up to a maximum of 1.4GHz, and in our Real World Benchmarks it managed an overall score of just 0.35. That lags behind most budget laptops, and it’s even a fair way off the pace of older Sandy Bridge low-voltage chips. Graphics performance is below par too – an average of 24fps in our least taxing Crysis benchmark indicates that gaming potential is limited to the most undemanding titles.

On the plus side, the choice of a power-frugal processor pays dividends when it comes to stamina. In our usual light usage battery tests, with Wi-Fi off and the screen brightness dimmed to 75cd/m[sup]2[/sup], the Samsung survived for 7hrs 52mins. That’s some way behind fully-fledged Ultrabooks equipped with Intel Haswell processors such as Sony’s VAIO Pro 13 or Apple’s MacBook Air 13in, but it’s a very respectable result nonetheless.

The ATIV Book 9 Lite also impresses by finding room in the budget for a touchscreen. The panel’s glossy finish feels wonderfully smooth under the finger, and the graphics hardware has enough oomph to keep the Windows 8 interface fluid and snappy at all times. As with Asus’ affordable VivoBook range, we think a touchscreen makes a lot of sense on a budget laptop, and it certainly helps make the most of Windows 8’s range of touch-friendly features and edge-swipe gestures.

Image quality is mediocre, however. Behind the glossy finish, there’s a bog-standard 13.3in, 1,366 x 768 panel. Brightness reaches an ample 241cd/m[sup]2[/sup], and colours are reasonably natural, too, but contrast dips to only 196:1. As a result, as with most budget laptop displays, greyish-looking blacks and a low contrast ratio make movies and images look pale and washed out. Viewing angles aren’t great, either, with image brightness dropping off noticeably when viewed from the sides.

If you want to connect an external display, the ATIV Book 9 Lite’s compact chassis offers both microHDMI and mini-D-SUB, alongside one USB 2 port, one USB 3 port, a full-sized SD card reader, 3.5mm headset jack and a proprietary mini-Ethernet socket which hooks up to the supplied Gigabit Ethernet adapter. There’s single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4 as well – not bad for the money – and a 0.9MP webcam. This is fine for chatting over Skype, but its soft, undetailed images are nothing to write home about.

It’s all topped off by that Scrabble-tile keyboard. It feels a bit plasticky, but there’s enough feedback to each keystroke to make for confident touch typing, and no shrunken or cramped keys to impede everyday use. It’s a similar story for the buttonless touchpad: Samsung is one of the few manufacturers to get the overall feel just right. Edge-swipes, double taps to two-fingered right-clicks all work reliably, and we only had to notch down the sensitivity a tad to get it feeling perfect.

Putting together a serviceable ultraportable for this kind of money is no mean feat, and while the ATIV Book 9 Lite is far from perfect, Samsung has struck a genuinely workable balance. Despite the several compromises required to keep the price down – not least the sluggish processor, plastic construction and somewhat portly chassis – the ATIV Book 9 Lite remains very usable indeed. Battery life is good by any standards; the limitations of the slow APU are mitigated by the nippy SSD; and if you don’t plan to make use of Windows 8’s touch controls, you can even save £100 by opting for a non-touchscreen version.

Whichever of the two models you decide upon, the ATIV Book 9 Lite is a heartening vision of what’s to come. When you can buy a quality Ultrabook clone such as this for £600, and crucially without first having to wait months for the prices to tumble, the future looks bright for the budget laptop.

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