Hey, I'm Donald Bell for CNET.com and today I'm taking a first look at the Samsung Series 5.
This is a new laptop from Samsung that runs Google's Chrome OS.
It's due out in June, pricing starts at $429 for a WiFi only model.
You also have a $499 option for a model that has built in 3D coverage through Verizon Wireless.
You also get 2 different colors here.
There's a white version and a dark silver version.
Both are gonna be available in the same prices and configurations.
There's not a lot to the laptop and that's really the point.
You get 16 gigabytes of onboard storage and when you boot it up, you're booting up right into the Chrome browser.
It has support for Google's Chrome browser application so that you can extend this through different apps store that's built in to the Chrome system.
You can also have support for all of Google's great apps like Gmail, calendaer, documents, all that functionalities here too.
So the upshot of having such a lean
system is that you get really fast startup time from a cold boot, 8 seconds will get you up into the operating system.
If you're just coming out of standby mode, that's gonna happen instantly.
You'll also get 81/2 hours of battery life, about 5 hours of video playback battery life, and the other good thing about this is that because nothing is really stored locally, everything is backed up to the clouds so that if you shut it down and this thing got run over by a train, you could rest assured that all that information that you've been working on, it's been [unk] to the cloud.
Just get a new
one, open it up, login and all your information is gonna be there.
Taking a look at the hardware design, you got a 12.1-inch screen.
This is a really bright screen, provided by Samsung.
You got a full-sized keyboard, a multi-touch track pad, you've got 2 USB ports, an HD webcam up at the top, and you also have a headphone jack and an SD card or 4-in-1 card slot here for memory cards right here on the front.
Under the hood, you get a 1.66 Dual Core Intel Atom processer.
So it's got some muscle but it's only got about 2 gigs of built in RAM so it's not gonna be a serious horsepower machine.
It's also not the lightest machine we've seen.
It's about a little over 3 pounds.
So it's not groundbreaking in terms of design, but I like the concept a lot.
It's really after a single lot of tabloids this year.
This kinda of strikes that same upheaval of being a machine that is affordable, is really utilitarian system
for getting on to the web, getting there fast, and having a really simple operating system without confusion people.
I think there's gonna be segment of people who are really gonna gravitate towards this because of it's simplicity, so yeah, I'm excited to see this in June.
For CNET.com, I'm Donald Bell and that was a first look at the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook.
