The Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus is here and I’ve been using it for four days. It’s a fantastic little machine with a few things that you’ll have to watch for; Micro ports being one of them, the screen being another. Yes, that 3200×1800 screen has not one, but two down-sides.
One of the best Ultrabooks of the 2012/2013 phase was the Samsung ATIV Book 9. It got even better with Haswell and a QHD screen in the following version. It’s a stunning bit of kit that I’ll be testing fully over the next week or two.
In the meantime, enjoy this overview video and feel free to ask questions. Price is currently about $1399 for the 128GB/4GB/QHD/Core i5 version. It’s not cheap and one could argue that for that price you shouldn’t have to carry adaptor cables but despite that, the quality, efficiency and style should fit with a lot of customers.
The Dell XPS 13 is finally in our hands, just in time for the live webcast this evening. Late yesterday evening I managed to get an overview video made and it’s embedded below. It’s a fantastic looking device which a punchy screen and a great keyboard but there’s also an issue of ports. For photographers and videographers, one of the target ‘creative’ markets for the Ultrabook, you’ll miss any form of SD card slot. For those using VGA and HDMI screens, you’ll be annoyed at having to buy one or two adaptors and even more annoyed when you forget to bring them to that presentation! The XPS 13 is certainly not the cheapest Ultrabook, it’s not the lightest either. Will the style be enough for you?
Ritchie has fielded a number of questions from folks interested in the Transformer Prime, and prepared a whopping 5 new videos for your viewing pleasure. We’ll drop one here, but if you’d like more, certainly go visit the post over at Ritchie’s Room.
We’ve got the LG Revolution on hand and have prepared an unboxing video for you which also features a flash test. I’m happy to report (and somewhat impressed) that the LG Revolution has so far handled YouTube 720p flash video quite well. This surprised me because the Revolution is using a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU as opposed to Nvidia’s Tegra. Have a look below:
We’ve got the Motorola Xoom [tracking page] on hand and have a nearly 30 minute-long overview session for you on video. You’ll be taken around the hardware of Motorola’s first slate and then we’ll dive into Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).
WARNING: please turn your volume down around 0:30, 16:06, and 17:24. My phone vibrated during recording and it came out very loudly on the video, my apologies!
There has been lots of talk about Notion Ink’s upcoming Adam slate device which will be running Android. One of the reasons why this 10 inch slate has interests piqued it is one of the first devices that we’ve seen using the oft-mentioned, but never quite implemented, Pixel Qi screen, that might be coming to market. The screen has the ability to display full color and motion just like a standard LCD screen, but it can be switched to a transreflective mode which makes it highly readable in direct sunlight, and allows the backlight to be turned off to save power.
We’ve been keeping our eye on this device as the company has been showing various prototypes over the last month or so. This post is here to lay out what we know about the device so far.