When Apple’s WWDC event concluded in June, there were a few disappointed faces. Product announcements came and went, but a MacBook Air with a Retina display wasn’t among them. Now, Samsung has beaten Apple to the punch with the Ativ Book 9 Plus.
A small crowd gathered in the PC Pro office as soon as it was out of the box: the matte-blue finish and thickness of only 13.9mm at its slimmest point make it a good-looking piece of kit even by Ultrabook standards.
Unusually, however, the crowd stayed after it was switched on, thanks to the gorgeous 13.3in, 3,200 x 1,800 screen. It plays the MacBook Pro 13in with Retina display at its own game – and beats it, thanks to a slightly higher pixel density and a superbly responsive touchscreen.
Reviewing the screen requires two approaches. From a hardware point of view, it’s fantastic: it’s bright and clear, and the Windows desktop – preset to display at 200% of its usual size – is incredibly crisp. Other displays look pixellated and dated in comparison. The arrival of high-PPI screens on Windows laptops is undoubtedly positive.
There are signs the Book 9 Plus is ahead of its time, though. Out of the box, the right-hand edge of the mouse pointer showed evidence of jagged artefacts. These cleared up once we’d installed the preview of Windows 8.1, which improves support for high-resolution screens, but the Book 9 Plus still placed the odd hurdle in our way.
Most applications work fine: the Microsoft Office apps look terrific – especially text – and Internet Explorer works perfectly, but elsewhere we hit problems. After installing Chrome and setting the default zoom level to 200%, we were able to read web pages in the app’s Metro mode, but the URL bar stubbornly remained 3mm high, which is too small to be usable. Switching to desktop mode improved things, but the application looked pixellated, and text was no longer razor-sharp.
Things were worse elsewhere: Photoshop CC – a natural application to run on a machine with such a high-specification screen – was unusable, thanks to tiny icons and menu bars; Photoshop Elements suffered from the same lilliputian problem.
Even Samsung’s own software had problems with the cutting-edge hardware: a bundled system utility warned that “screen resolution is very high” and urged us to change it. As with the MacBook Pro, the effectiveness of the Book 9 Plus will depend on developers rolling out support for high resolutions. Apple’s OS-wide scaling makes non-optimised software much more usable than this.
Warranty | |
---|---|
Warranty | 1 yr return to base |
Physical specifications | |
Dimensions | 319 x 222 x 17mm (WDH) |
Weight | 1.400kg |
Travelling weight | 1.8kg |
Processor and memory | |
Processor | Intel Core i5-4200U |
RAM capacity | 4.00GB |
Memory type | DDR3 |
Screen and video | |
Screen size | 13.3in |
Resolution screen horizontal | 3,200 |
Resolution screen vertical | 1,600 |
Resolution | 3200 x 1600 |
Graphics chipset | Intel HD Graphics 4400 |
VGA (D-SUB) outputs | 1 (via optional adapter) |
HDMI outputs | 1 |
S-Video outputs | 0 |
DVI-I outputs | 0 |
DVI-D outputs | 0 |
DisplayPort outputs | 0 |
Drives | |
Replacement battery price inc VAT | £0 |
Networking | |
802.11a support | yes |
802.11b support | yes |
802.11g support | yes |
802.11 draft-n support | yes |
Integrated 3G adapter | no |
Bluetooth support | yes |
Other Features | |
Wireless hardware on/off switch | no |
Wireless key-combination switch | yes |
Modem | no |
ExpressCard34 slots | 0 |
ExpressCard54 slots | 0 |
PC Card slots | 0 |
FireWire ports | 0 |
PS/2 mouse port | no |
9-pin serial ports | 0 |
Parallel ports | 0 |
3.5mm audio jacks | 1 |
SD card reader | yes |
Pointing device type | Touchpad |
Speaker location | Base |
Hardware volume control? | no |
Integrated microphone? | yes |
Integrated webcam? | yes |
TPM | no |
Fingerprint reader | no |
Smartcard reader | no |
Battery and performance tests | |
Battery life, light use | 8hr 3min |
Battery life, heavy use | 2hr 28min |
Overall Real World Benchmark score | 0.64 |
Responsiveness score | 0.74 |
Media score | 0.67 |
Multitasking score | 0.51 |
Operating system and software | |
Operating system | Windows 8 64-bit |
OS family | Windows 8 |
Recovery method | Recovery disc |
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