A blend of affordability and style
The Samsung Series 5 530U4B offers a few rare touches with an optical drive
Dubai: The Samsung Series 5 530U4B is a 14-inch ultrabook that's affordable and offers a few rare touches with an optical drive.
An ultrabook is Intel's idea of the ideal ultra-portable. They all sport Intel Core i3-i7 CPUs, have a minimum of 4GB RAM, use SSD or hybrid SSD storage, are less than one inch thick and tend to weigh under 1.4 kilograms.
The Samsung Series 5 comes in at 1.78 kilograms. However, it gets away with this due to its larger screen plus optical drive and dedicated Radeon graphics — making it the first ultrabook to support something other than Intel's mediocre integrated effort.
Tapered edges
It's still less than 21mm thick and its sleek, tapered edges make it appear even slimmer.
Build quality is solid and feels premium due to its anodised aluminium lid and palm-rest. Both of these are nice to touch and don't pick up fingerprints. The keyboard surround is plastic to keep the weight down.
The laptop has more ports than the average ultrabook, probably because the machine is thicker than the other ultrabooks.
On the right there's a memory card reader, single USB 2.0 port, and the attractively recessed optical drive. On the left side are the power jack, ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, a VGA port, an HDMI interface and a headset microphone jack.
From the configuration point of view, 530U4B's interface number is comparable with an ordinary notebook.
The adoption of AMD Radeon HD 7550M discrete graphics is the bright spot, it also allows 530U4B to become the first ultrabook equipped with discrete graphics.
For video conferencing there's the 1.3MP HD webcam and, last but not least, on wireless duties we have those two good amigos, WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0.
Solid-state drive
It runs on Intel dual-core Sandy Bridge i5-2467M, which runs at 1.6GHz but can Turbo clock up to 2.3GHz. It's backed by the standard 4GB of RAM and combines a 500GB hard drive with a 16GB solid-state drive, dubbed Express Cache. It is used to speed up booting and resume from sleep.
This ultrabook has a boot up time of around 24 seconds from shutdown and wakes up the unit from sleep almost instantaneously.
Your most frequently used files and applications will also be cached on the SSD to speed them up, while the traditional drive means you still have plenty of storage space. Battery life is the only real disappointment with this ultrabook. The 530U4B managed just around five hours in my battery test. It costs Dh3,999.
