The aluminum- cased Samsung Series 9 has been touted as a serious MacBook Air alternative. Weighing just 2.88 pounds, it’s virtually the same heft as the 13-inch MacBook Air, and at .64″ thick, it’s even slightly thinner. However, The Series 9 comes with the latest Sandy Bridge processors from Intel. The main criticism with the MacBook Air is its slightly older processors. Also, the Series 9 ships with one USB 3.0 port standard too, and a mini-HDMI port.
The 13.3-inch Series 9 comes with 128 GB of SSD storage and 4 GB of RAM. Startup time is quoted at a zippy 15 seconds, and battery life for the notebook is rated at up to seven hours. It starts shipping today (March 17th 2011) for a rather pricey $1600(USD), and can be ordered over at the Microsoft Store now. The 11-inch model will be available in April. Instead of the Sandy Bridge Core i5-2537M, it will have an i3 CPU, 64 GB of SSD storage and 2 GB of RAM.
This makes this little laptop a serious alternative for the ‘ultraportable’ laptop consumer – until Apple upgrades the processors of the MacBook Air, that is.
[via CrunchGear]
