Samsung Series 3: First Look

Hi, I'm Dan Ackerman and we are here taking a look at the Samsung Series 3. Now, if you remember way back at CES 2011, everyone was blown away by Samsung Series 9 laptops. Those are super thin, super high-end, super fancy 13-inch and later 11-inch laptops but they were very expensive. The Series 3 is kind of a more budget-minded version of that. It takes some of the same design queues and knocked it down to mostly plastic. It had something [unk] is not quite as good but for a lot less expensive at the same time. Now, this version of the Series 3, the first one, you can go out and buy it. It's an 11-inch and instead of that AMD E350 CPU you see in a lot of the 11-inch ultraportables, this actually has an Intel Core i3 which gives it better performance. Apart from that, you're gonna see a lot of similarities with those AMD 11-inch systems that you see everywhere like the HP dm1. It has got the same 11-inch 1366x768 screen. It got a nice flat key keyboard, a fairly large touchpad and all the systems are, you know, lightweight and pretty well-made. They're definitely a step up from these netbooks that were popular a couple of years ago with mostly a 10-inch screen. These are a little bit more expensive but a little bit more powerful and much easier to use as your day to day laptop. We definitely like the processing power from the Core i3 in this. Battery life? Well, wasn't that great. We got about 3 hours but our battery life test is very tough. You'd probably get a little bit more just using it casually for web surfing and e-mail and things like that. Now, this 11-inch Series 3 is $599 which seemed a little bit cheaper at some places. But, that is almost into regular laptop territory and certainly more expensive than a lot of the other 11-inch ultraportables that we've seen. So, you have to decide if that extra power is worth it to you. I'm Dan Ackerman and that is the Samsung Series 3.