-Hi, I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for cnet.com.
Today, we're gonna take a look at the editor's choice winning Samsung Series 7 all-in-one.
So, this is Samsung's first all-in-one for the U.S. market.
And as you can see, it started off with a pretty nice design [unk].
This is a really clean-looking system.
It's made entirely of brushed aluminum with a little bit of black plastic here at the bottom.
And one of the things we like most about the system is just it has a very clean look.
As you can see, it's nice and angular down here on the sides.
It's pretty clean up front.
The only one real ding we have on its design is this optical drive here.
It's a DVD burner, which sticks out from the front.
It actually kinda makes sense because there's a series of buttons on the top here that you can use to control some basic functions of the system, but it still kinda creates this sort of protruding little piece that just kinda looks awkward.
With that said, we're willing to live with that little quirk just because the rest of the system is pretty well conceived.
This is a touchscreen all-in-one and Samsung's implementation is very well done.
The screen is nice and responsive, but what we like best about it is the Touch software that Samsung has come up with.
Now, you can actually launch the Touch software with one of the buttons on the front of the system.
It takes a minute to load the software once you first turn the system on, but after that first time, you can easily shut down and move between the Windows environment.
Now what we like most about this touch environment is how simple it is.
The sidebar has some basic information.
You've got weather,
a clock as well as a to-do list, but over here, you can see a series of touch specific and general apps that Samsung has pre-installed.
You've got various media players, a browser, an RSS reader, and all pretty simple straightforward stuff.
You can also add icons to this environment from windows and it is a very simple process.
Simply push this button here.
It looks so familiar with the icons getting the X mark next to them, and you go here to add an app for the desktop.
We'll pick the user guide, drag it over here.
Go back into the touch environment and you can see it's listed here on the second page.
Now, the other killer feature the Series 7 has is the flex ability of its display.
And we've seen other all-in-ones that give you a fair range of motion, but Samsung is the first that can go full 90 degrees and work like a Microsoft surface tabletop and that was actually Samsung's inspiration for its design.
So we can't say we see a broad range of applications that would make sense to use like this.
It would also be kind of awkward to use if, say, you had it on a desk and you wanted to bring in multiple users to stand around it.
It just wouldn't work.
So practically speaking, this might not be the most convenient way to use this PC, but we'd like the fact that Samsung lets you do it.
So, in terms of performance, this is not the most competitive PC out there particularly for its 1199 price tag.
You get a core i5 CPU, 8 gigs of ram, a terabyte hard drive, and an embedded graphics chip.
That's enough to run all these applications and will handle pretty much any day-to-day productivity you wanna throw at the system, but for games and, say, higher level multimedia editing, you really want something a little more powerful.
Now, for its price, that's a reasonable set of specs.
The only thing that would really make this a steal is that it included a Blu-ray drive instead of the standard DVD burner.
You get a pretty typical wireless mouse and keyboard down here on the right side.
You get a USB 3 port as well as an SD card reader.
And for ports, you get 4 USB 2 jacks, an Ethernet port, and both HDMI in and HDMI out.
Now obviously, those are great.
They let you not only use the system as sort of a home media kiosk if you wanna, say, plug in a cable box or game consul.
It also makes it easier to add a second monitor.
Finally, over here on the right, you get the standard analog audio in and outputs.
Now, with few exceptions, we've got news the idea of an all-in-one PC as a commodity product just like the Mid-Tower desktops.
Samsung though has brought some great features to the table in the Series 7 and we're really interested to see what else it's gonna do in the desktop market here in the U.S. So, I'm Rich Brown.
This is the editor's choice winning Samsung Series 7 all-in-one.
