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Samsung Series 5 Ultra: Slim and Stylish, but Not an Ultrabook

31.03.2012
The Samsung Series 5 Ultra is into the Ultrabook market (if you don’t count the , which predates the Ultrabook brand). There's just one problem: It weighs nearly 4 pounds, and measures 0.82 inch thick. In other words, this 14-inch laptop is closer to a regular ol' ultraportable than it is to an Ultrabook.

are high-end, ultrathin notebooks defined by Intel as being 18mm (0.7 inch) thick at the most--but that specification is for models with screens 13.3 inches or smaller. With the advent of the Series 5 Ultra, Intel has stretched the requirements to make 21mm (0.83 inch) the standard thickness for machines with 14-inch or larger screens. Nevertheless, the Series 5 Ultra looks a little, well, thick, especially when it's sitting next to other . In fact, it looks almost as chunky as my 15-inch MacBook Pro, which measures 24mm (0.95 inch) thick.

Needless to say, the Series 5 Ultra hardly inspires the same oohs, aahs, and oh-my-gosh-that-laptop-is-so-thins as other Ultrabooks do.

But there's a reason that this particular laptop is so comparatively hefty: It has both a DVD-RW drive and a 500GB hard drive. Our review model, priced at $950 (as of March 30, 2012), features an Intel Core i5-2467M processor, 4GB of RAM, and Windows 7 Home Premium. It also has built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, and a 16GB solid-state cache drive that helps it boot quickly and resume from hibernate more rapidly (a necessity for Ultrabook branding).

The Series 5 Ultra sports a minimalist design and looks an awful lot like Apple's MacBook Pro line. The laptop's cover is a smooth, lightly brushed slate-gray aluminum with a small silver Samsung logo on the left side. The interior is largely the same: smooth, lightly brushed, and slate-gray, though not all of it is aluminum (just the wrist-rest area is metal; the remainder is plastic). The laptop feels sturdy (and heavy, for an Ultrabook), though the hinge is a little squeaky.

The laptop has more ports than the average Ultrabook, probably because the machine is thicker than the average Ultrabook. On the left side, it provides a fold-out gigabit ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, VGA-out, HDMI-out, and a combined headphone/microphone jack. The right side is mostly dedicated to the tray-loading DVD-RW drive, but Samsung also squeezes in a lock slot, a USB 2.0 port, and a four-in-one card reader. That's a lot to pack into an Ultrabook, and the other Ultrabooks we've seen have had no more than one USB 3.0 port.