Take a look at the back of most Ultrabooks and you’ll find nothing. By having sealed-in batteries the OEMS save money, weight and space. The owner, however, is left with the big unknown of battery lifetime and if you’ve ever owned a laptop you’ll know how totally useless they are when you have to drag the mains cable around with you everywhere. I recently had to order a new internal battery for a Samsung Series 5 NP530 that is under two years old and has zero battery capacity. On the other hand I’m typing this on a two-year old Ultrabook that still has 85% battery capacity. So how long will the average battery last?
I tested the Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch with SSD recently. It was a fantastic bit of kit but lacked a few features. The 1366×768 screen was a bit 2012 and there was no keyboard backlighting. When I saw that the Samsung ATIV Book 5 was launching I was hopeful that we’d be seeing the necessary upgrades. Alas, it appears that the Book 5 is nothing more than a re-positioning exercise.
While Ultrabooks generally perform to similar efficiencies under load there’s quite a difference when it comes to near-idle operations and that can seriously impact the length of time you can use an Ultrabook as an offline word processor. As a blogger that’s a very important scenario for me and I suspect that if you’re offline and answering a bunch of emails or writing a presentation or report, this scenario is important to you too. If you choose the right Ultrabook you can get 10 hours of typing on one battery charge.
AMDs Ultrathin laptops have been a long time coming. I remember a promise of an Ultrathin at CES in Jan that didn’t materialise. I’ve heard big talk from AMD at their investor conference back in Feb. The Samsung and HP Ultrathins were launched around June but it’s mid August now and if you’re looking for an ultrathin based on AMD’s A6 at under 2KG, only the Samsung Series 5 NP535U3C fits the bill. But how does it perform? It’s coming in at about €100 / $100 less than the equivalent Ultrabook so there’s room to maneuver for the AMD-based Ultrathin.
Perfect. One of the first (if not the first) AMD-base ultrathin is on the starting blocks, and it’s built inside the same casing as the Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook that is also getting the Ivy Bridge upgrade. This is the perfect opportunity to get side-by-side testing done. How does the Samsung Series 5 NP530 perform against the $100 cheaper Samsung NP535? We can’t answer that question now but it won’t take long to get some figures an feedback.
Another huge day for the Ultrabook world as Computex gets started on day one! Most of the big surprises like the Asus TaiChi and Transformer Book were outed on Day 0, but there was still a flood of exciting news today. We worked hard to bring you detailed coverage here at Ultrabook News and now we’ve got a handy round-up of all the Computex Day 1 news; come on in and check it out!
The Dell XPS 13, Toshiba Z830, Lenovo U300s and Samsung Series 5 were with me towards the end of week so in addition to the live webcast, I took the opportunity to try and do a round-up video.
It’s time for another live session here at Ultrabooknews. Friday 11th at 2000hrs 2100hrs (9pm Berlin, Your timezone here.)
We’ve already received the Lenovo U300s here and tomorrow we’re expecting a Dell XPS 13 so it makes sense to put them together with the other two Ultrabooks we already have here and to give you the chance to interact with, oh, lets just call it the biggest live Ultrabook review ever!
I’m also pleased to announce that we have a special guest. Patrick Moorehead of Moor Insights and Strategy will join me for an Ultrabook discussion at the start of the session. Patrick has been tracking the mobile computing sector and steering companies for many years. He’s a former VP of Strategy for AMD and I know it will be fun and enlightening to talk to him. Your questions are welcome, of course.
