Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Stein and we're already in the middle of holiday shopping season it seems so what are you gonna buy when it comes to the good old fashioned laptop laptops are around of course there are Windows ones there are Mac ones in the windows world what do you have that's not a tablet transformable thingamajig what do you have that's something that is an everyday type of computer if it's not gonna cost a lot well we've seen touch windows ultrabooks floating around for a while at that $800 price pretty good but a lot of those models have been discontinued Samsung had the series 9 which was a great sleek MacBook Air like in the windows world that got renamed the book 9 and then got split into two different products the book 9 plus and the book 9 light which is what we're looking at here a more affordable spin on the Samsung Book 9 / series 9 a long time ago but you're giving up quite a bit I think to get down to this price it's $800 maybe 749 depending on where you shopped for it and it's got a touchscreen which of course a lot of Windows 8 laptops have now and it's got a sleek ish design but it's plastic and it has a different processor than a lot of ultrabooks instead of an Intel Core i5 or i7 this is an AMD quad core processor and it's not specified particularly which one it is it's a custom AMD processor that Samsung has inside this laptop plus your 4 gigs of ram 128 gig SSD but a pretty plasticky feel no backlit keyboard and you know the ports are a little bit shrunken down micro HDMI which a lot of people may not be a fan of let's get down to the processing here the quad-core AMD processor is fine but it's not as fast as others in our benchmark tests so you're giving up there and the battery life is about 5 hours which is not that great now you can get battery life up in the 8 hour plus range which a lot of laptops are throwing out there with 4th gen Intel processors based on what we've seen so is it worth it man I would get it if it was on sale something like $600 but 749 seems too expensive if you were a Samsung design fan or you're using the Samsung app ecosystem Samsung does have I think on here which allows you to connect and use a Samsung phone certain ones in the Galaxy line and show the phone on here as a second screen but I would hold out try to find an Intel powered one or something that's maybe pay up a little bit more in a $900 $1,000 if you really want something better or you can see what's discontinued out there honestly we've seen $800 ultrabooks that match this performance and ones that are even more affordable so look around out there on Amazon and see what else you could find the book 9 light noble effort a little too expensive and not a fan of the processing power I'm Scott Stein and that's a quick look at the Samsung ativ book 9 light also available in white