I was in need of a laptop and after looking around, decided on a Samsung Series9 Ultrabook. I had first seen it maybe a year ago, and liked it as it ran Windows, and was thiner/lighter than a MacBook Air. I ended up picking up the 13.3″ mid-2012 revision that runs Windows 8 with 256SSD and 4GB RAM on an i5. I was also looking at the 15″ i7 with 8GB RAM which was only $250 more, but after seeing it in store, decided it was too big for my purposes. The 13.3″ is quite a nice form factor – the screen is not too small and the footprint is not too big.

The hardware design is nice, everything is solid but light. I had heard bad comments about the keyboard, but I found it to be OK for actual typing. The one gripe I had is the placement of the Enter button, which isn’t as horizontal (like an underscore) that I’m used to; rather it’s like a mirrored lowercase R, so I end up hitting the key on the left of Enter whenever I want a line break. Although I tried a bunch of other ultrabooks and their chiclet keyboard layouts are the same.

This is my first computer with Windows 8, and unsurprisingly, I ignored the Metro theme and popped back into the desktop as soon as I booted up. I don’t really understand how the Metro theme works and it’s been a frustrating experience so far. I had to manually uninstall each app I don’t want (there were many preloaded) and I can’t figure out how to restart the machine short of logging off and then hitting restart!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: microsoft, samsung, techlust