You might be wondering why Ultrabooks are going to cost $1000 or more when similar, slightly heavier designs are coming in at 75% of the cost.

The Samsung Series 3 that’s just gone on sale gives us a good chance to do some comparisons and there’s two things we need  to consider.

1) Market acceptance

2) Design, hardware, production costs

If you take a look at the Samsung Series 3 [at Liliputing], you’ll see it’s running the Intel Core i5 2nd-gen CPu just like the Series 9. In the Series 3 that’s selling for $735 now  you’ve got a 2.3Ghz version rather than a 1.3-1.5Ghz version. The reason is, size.

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Both the Samsung 900X1B and the Apple MacBook Air that was announced today should be available from tomorrow. Both weigh the same. Both use a similar ‘Sandy Bridge’ platform, both offer an 11.6″ screen, both look sleek and both cost about $1000.

One runs Windows 7, the other runs the newly-available Apple OS X Lion operating system.

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Both are, in my eyes, Ultrabooks. Intel may not agree when they finally publish their Ultrabook sepcifications but for the time being, this is about as close as it gets to 1KG, high-capability mobile computing.

For a few dollars and a few ounces more you could go to the 13″ versions of these with even more power and capability but the real fight here is between Windows and IOS, with a touch of fan-leverage too. Early reviews of Lion (there’s a huge one here at ARS Technica) make exciting reading.

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While not officially an ultrabook, the beautiful Samsung Series 9 uses exactly the same platform as the Asus UX21 will when it launches. It comes with a generous 128GB SSD and it’s super-light too. The only issue is that it’s expensive.

That’s not going to deter us from testing one though so next week we’ll have the Samsung 900X3A with Core i5-2537M (NP-900X3A-A01DE) and we’ll be doing a live review session in partnership with my other blogging location, UMPCPortal.com Stay tuned here and on Twitter for more information.

We’ve put the Series 9 in the database alongside the UX21