Sony VAIO Tap 11 Ultrabook review: Sleek and sexy, but far too slippery

Sony VAIO Tap 11 $1,199.00 Sony's super-svelte VAIO Tap 11 comes with sharp looks, impressive specs—and a host of design and usability shortcomings.

The rush is on to offer tablet PCs with ever stronger laptop alter egos, and Sony makes a splash with its new VAIO Tap 11. It’s a full Windows 8 tablet PC, impossibly thin and light, with a gorgeous screen and an even thinner keyboard cover at no additional charge.

And, wait—is that a fourth-generation Intel Core i5-4210Y processor? Yes, and it comes with 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory and a 128GB SSD, too, conferring some serious Ultrabook cred to this 1.7-pound panel. The Tap 11 is almost as skinny as Apple’s iPad Air, and it makes Microsoft’s Surface Pro 2 look chunky.

The VAIO Tap 11 is not the carefree experience one hopes for from a tablet. It’s surprisingly fiddly and awkward as an on-the-go PC.

Now for a dose of reality. In spite of the Tap 11’s great looks and high-octane silicon, Sony made too many compromises in its pursuit of marketing superlatives: It’s the thinnest, lightest 2-in-1 Ultrabook you can buy. But it’s merely an okay tablet and, at best, it’s a short-term stand-in for a notebook. You can find much better choices at the Tap 11’s $1100 price level—notably the Surface Pro 2 ($999 for the 4GB RAM/128GB storage model plus $130 for its keyboard cover).

The VAIO Tap 11 is sexy enough to earn a look at its high points first. As I’ve already mentioned, Sony managed to stuff an impressive amount of computing prowess into this small frame, which is similar in size to letter paper and only four-tenths of an inch thick. Its 11.6-inch screen, with its resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, looks great and is very responsive to the touch. It has an 8MP camera on the back and a 2MP webcam above the display.

ROBERT CARDIN

The narrow kickstand and detached keyboard make it impossible to actually use the VAIO Tap 11 as a laptop on your lap.

Sony's VAIO Tap 11 is a real Windows 8 Ultrabook, but so is Microsoft's Surface Pro 2, and we like that 2-in-1 a lot more.

The Tap 11 even offers a little more than the usual connectivity for a tablet computer. Most slates don’t come with any USB ports, much less USB 3.0. You also get a micro HDMI port, a microSD card slot, and a headset jack. Wi-Fi comes standard, although Sony provides only a dual-band 802.11n adapter. I really liked the Assist button on the upper right corner on the back of the panel, a feature common to VAIO notebooks. One press takes you to the VAIO Care menu, a well-written help utility. Finally, Sony designed the power supply cord to separate easily from the PC, much like quick-release ski bindings, to prevent stress on cords and power ports.

The speeds and feeds are impressive, and I found some welcome design elements, too. But overall the VAIO Tap 11 is not the carefree and fun experience one hopes to get from a tablet. And for an on-the-go PC, it’s surprisingly fiddly and awkward.

The moment my editor handed me the Tap 11 to take home, the keyboard cover slid away from the screen, and I almost spilled the whole mess on the floor. Not an auspicious start.

Turns out, the keyboard attaches to the panel only magnetically. You can’t clip the two components together for transport. A tiny three-pin connector at the bottom right corner of the screen charges the battery in this wireless Bluetooth keyboard—and that’s the only way to charge it. If the keyboard runs out of juice, you can only tap on the screen—as slow and error-prone as that might be. Alternatively, you can plug another keyboard into the tablet’s lone USB 3.0 port, although chances are small to nil that you’d be carrying along a backup wired keyboard with you on the road. 

ROBERT CARDIN

Whoever said, "you can never be too thin" was wrong, at least when it comes to computer keyboards.

I charged the Tap 11 overnight, and headed back to San Francisco the next morning to wander around the farmer’s market. I tried to use the Tap 11 on the train trip into town, perching the screen precariously on my knees as I pecked away on the flexing, wafer-thin (3/16-inch) keyboard cover, wishing I could attach the keyboard to the panel, as you can with the Surface Pro 2.

The Tap 11’s kickstand does beat the one on the Surface Pro in that you can position the screen at the exact angle you want; however, it’s so narrow (less than an inch wide) that it’s hard to set up the panel on anything but a large, stable, and flat surface, such as a desk. Although you can place the Surface Pro 2’s kickstand in only one of two positions, it’s far more stable because it’s as wide as the tablet itself.

I got to the market, bought brunch, and settled down at a table. I quickly decided that the keyboard is not much fun to use on a flat surface, either, mainly due to its super-sensitive touchpad—it has the worst fly-away cursor problem I’ve suffered in ages. Thank goodness Sony made it easy to turn the touchpad off.

Finishing my plate of porchetta, I headed into the throng to see if the Tap 11 would redeem itself in its tablet persona. First, I had to figure out where to stash the keyboard. I slipped it keys-up under the panel, but that arrangement didn’t last because the pair is so slippery. And the keyboard’s so flimsy, I couldn’t just stuff it into my bag, lest it flex and break. I ended up sandwiching the keyboard between two books to protect it.

ROBERT CARDIN

They detachable keyboard's touchpad is much too sensitive. 

Keyboard stowed carefully away, I was free to use the Tap 11 as a tablet. It works fine as a mobile slate, if you don’t mind cradling 1.7 pounds of computer while you scroll through and read webpages. Some people will happily do that and benefit from the Tap 11’s spacious 11.6-inch screen. Others will prefer the lighter, one-pound iPad Air, even if it means dropping down to a 9.7-inch display.

Another task for which bigger isn’t always better: taking photos and video. The 8MP rear camera produced excellent images, but the panel’s so big, it’s very hard to shoot discreetly and on-the-fly. Several times while shooting the colorful produce, I had market-goers ask me to leave them out of my shots.

The Tap 11’s crisp, vivid display is one of its high points. Thanks to its IPS-like design, I could easily read the screen from a wide range of viewing angles. The high resolution renders display elements small at the default display setting, but the screen responds to touch gestures like a dream, letting you quickly and accurately blow up text and images to the exact size you want. A downside: The screen’s a little more reflective than most, making glare a problem for me once the San Francisco fog burned off.

The VAIO Tap 11 delivered a respectable Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score. (Click charts to enlarge.)

As with most slates, you can enter text either by tapping on the on-screen keyboard or by writing with the supplied digitizer pen. The screen keyboard is big and it works well enough, but the writing system needs work. When you scribble along, the recognition system looks ahead too eagerly and often interprets characters incorrectly at first, even though it usually gets it right eventually—if you keep writing. Trouble is, you have to fight the urge to go back and correct it. Also, recognition can take a long time even for simple characters.

Less forgivable is the kludgy pen holder. Instead of a silo to securely house the pen, Sony opted for a small, fragile, and eminently losable plastic holder that clips on the upper left side of the panel. That’s a great location for southpaws, but it’s awkward for right-handers. Even worse, that clip covers the hatch to the USB and HDMI ports, blocking access to those connectors. I often had to root around inside my bag to find the pen after it popped out of its holder. At $40 a pop, the pen’s an expensive item to lose. You can also write with your fingertip, but the pen works much better.

Battery life isn't one of the VAIO Tap 11's strong suits. (Note: Subsequent battery run-down tests on the Surface Pro 2, following a firmware update, yielded 7 hours of useful life.)

Speaking of slow, the Tap 11 can take a long time—sometimes 5 seconds or more— to orient the display when you turn the screen from landscape to portrait mode or vice versa, and it can be finicky if you hold the panel at an angle. Occasionally the display even stays upside down in landscape mode until you rotate the Tap 11 again. Isn’t this the kind of thing that a faster processor and more memory is supposed to speed up and improve?

The Tap 11 works hard to dissipate heat. It stayed mostly cool for me, but with just a few apps running and working in a cool environment (typically around 64 degrees), the fan spun much of the time.

The Tap 11 performs well, for a 2-in-1. Its WorldBench 8.1 score of 249 places it solidly in the pack of Core i5 and Core i7 mobiles, although it noticeably trails the Surface Pro 2. As with most very small machines, the Tap 11 is pathetic at playing hardcore games. Running Bioshock Infinite even at the lowest-res setting (1024 by 768), the Tap 11 eked out only 12 frames per second. That’s no surprise considering the absence of a discrete GPU. 

Sony seems to have sacrificed battery life in its quest to make the Tap 11 super thin and light. This tablet lasted a middling 4.5 hours on the PCWorld test bench, and I got less in my hands-on use. The Surface Pro 2 with 4GB of memory and 128GB of storage ran 2.5 hours longer, and Dell's XPS 11 ran an hour longer. 

The VAIO Tap 11 is beautiful and ambitious. I really wanted to like it, but it just has too many drawbacks. If you need a big tablet that can run Windows 8, take another look at the Surface Pro 2. It performs better, and you can attach its keyboard to its display to make a portable PC that’s much easier to use.

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Sony VAIO Pro 13 review: This audacious Ultrabook is guaranteed to get you noticed

Sony VAIO Pro 13 $1,400.00 The VAIO Pro 13 trades some performance for looks; but this Ultrabook is so beautiful, you won’t care.

Mix one part fashion sense with two parts high-tech wizardry, and you get Sony’s VAIO Pro 13. If you’re looking for a notebook that will turn heads when your manicured fingers slide it out of your Gucci messenger bag, this is the Ultrabook to buy.

In all seriousness, you needn’t worry that the VAIO Pro is all style and no substance. This amazingly light machine can handle just about any task other than hard-core games (due to its reliance on integrated graphics). Although the configuration Sony sent us for review has only a Core i5-4200U processor and 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory (just as Lenovo uses in its much-cheaper IdeaPad U430 Touch), the VAIO Pro also has a 128GB solid-state drive to help level the playing field. And whereas Lenovo provides a 1600-by-900-pixel panel, Sony goes for the full monty with a gorgeous 1920-by-1080-pixel display that benefits from the company’s expertise in designing and manufacturing HDTVs.

ROBERT CARDINThe downside to the VAIO Pro 13's razer-thin profile is that it has only enough real estate for two USB 3.0 ports. (Click to enlarge.)

The VAIO Pro’s chassis is enveloped in carbon fiber and looks sharp enough to slice a roast. Sony’s VAIO logo, rendered in chrome, is embedded in the lid, and a chrome accent strip decorates its back edge. When the machine is fully open, the bottom of the lid nicely elevates the rear of the computer, putting the keyboard at the perfect typing angle.

The Sony VAIO Pro 13 produced a very respectable Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score for a machine that’s outfitted with a Core i5 (as opposed to a Core i7) processor. (Click to enlarge.)

The backlit, island-style keyboard has well-spaced keys that are completely flat. Touch-typists might need some time to get used to them, as well as to the half-size arrow keys beneath the Shift key. Press the Assist button at the top of the keyboard, and you’re greeted with Sony’s VAIO Care utility, which offers helpful, if basic, troubleshooting advice.

The performance of Intel's integrated graphics has increased by leaps and bounds, but it's still miles from competing with even a midrange dedicated graphics chip. (Click to enlarge.)

In our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 test suite, the VAIO Pro fell short of the score that HP’s Envy TouchSmart 15t posted, but that’s because the Envy TouchSmart is equipped with a Core i7 processor and 8GB of memory. As I said, the VAIO Pro’s SSD does a lot to level the playing field.

The SSD doesn’t help much, however, with gaming performance. On that score, the VAIO Pro gets trounced by laptops that have discrete graphics processors. And the flip side of relying on an SSD is that you have limited storage—just 128GB in this case—so you might want to carry an external drive or rely on cloud storage.

The Sony VAIO Pro 13 delivered an impressive 6 hours, 14 minutes of battery life. (Click to enlarge.)

The VAIO 13 Pro has only enough real estate on its right side to accommodate a headset jack, an SD Card reader, HDMI-out, and a pair of USB ports (both of which are USB 3.0). The left side is occupied by a vent. Speaking of vents, this computer is completely silent: All I could hear when I put my ear next to the vent was the soft whoosh of air in motion.

Freed from powering a mechanical hard drive and a discrete graphics processor, the battery in the VAIO Pro ran for an impressive 6 hours, 14 minutes before it conked out. But the VAIO Pro’s most impressive spec is its weight: At 2.34 pounds, it weighs less than the Toshiba Qosmio X75’s power supply.

Note: This review is part of a roundup of the 5 best Haswell notebooks as of September 2013.

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Acer Aspire V7 review: This Ultrabook can play a decent game or two

Acer’s Aspire V7 (model 482PG-9884) remedies many of the shortcomings I mention in my review of HP’s Envy TouchSmart 15t. In addition, it has faster components, more memory, and better battery life. On the other hand, the Aspire V7 costs $350 more than the Envy—but there are a number of good reasons for that.

Acer selected Intel’s Core i7-4500U CPU, a lower-voltage chip than the one HP chose; it has a maximum thermal design power of 15 watts, in contrast to the 47-watt TDP of the Core i7-4700MQ in the Envy. That CPU contributes greatly to the Aspire V7’s superior battery life (5 hours, 2 minutes in our tests, versus the HP’s 3 hours, 19 minutes).

Robert CardinAcer's Aspire V7 can't compete with Sony's VAIO Pro 13 for the sexiest Ultrabook, but it packs higher-end components and a larger screen.(Click to enlarge)

And whereas HP cut a few corners to squeeze both a Core i7 processor and a discrete GPU into the Envy’s $950 price tag, Acer managed to toss in a 24GB solid-state drive and 12GB of DDR3/1600 memory alongside a faster discrete GPU, Nvidia’s GeForce GT 750M. The SSD acts as a cache for a 1TB, 5400-rpm mechanical hard drive, and it makes Windows and applications load lickety-split. The SSD and the graphics card boosted the Aspire V7’s benchmark scores by a considerable margin.

Acer’s machine delivered an impressive Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 246, marking it as nearly 2.5 times faster than our reference notebook, an Asus VivoBook S550CA powered by a third-generation Core i5 CPU. The Aspire V7 is a capable gaming notebook, too, as it ran our BioShock Infinite test at a very playable 76.5 frames per second (with the resolution set to 1024 by 768 pixels and the visual quality set to low).

It's simple: You need a discrete GPU for reasonable gaming performance. And the Aspire V7 has one. (Click to enlarge.)

The Aspire V7’s 15-inch touchscreen display, which provides a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, is vibrant and responsive. The smaller screen means that the system lacks enough room to include an embedded numeric keypad, but the keys that are present are backlit and nicely spaced. Although they’d benefit from a bit of sculpting to provide better tactile feedback, the keys travel just the right distance for comfort and accuracy. While this machine measures just 0.83 inch thick, it’s twice as heavy—4.7 pounds—as the Sony VAIO Pro 13 (which is a wafer-thin 0.68 inch thick and weighs just 2.3 pounds).

Intel’s lower-voltage Core i7-4500U CPU contributed significantly to the Acer Aspire V7’s impressive battery life. (Click to enlarge.)

Acer outfitted the Aspire V7 with three USB ports, but only one is USB 3.0 (and it’s oddly placed on the rear of the computer alongside a gigabit ethernet port, HDMI-out, and a VGA-out that relies on a dongle). The two USB 2.0 ports are located on the left and right sides, and an SD Card reader sits on the right. The power button, however, is oddly positioned on the left side (where you’ll inevitably press it accidentally and power down your computer when all you intended to do was to pick it up).

The Acer Aspire V7 isn’t the ultimate Ultrabook, but it’s thin, it’s fast enough for all but the most demanding content-creation tasks, and it’ll play hard-core games (albeit at slightly lower resolution than full HD). I like it a lot.

Note: This review is part of a roundup of the 5 best Haswell notebooks as of September 2013.

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Dell XPS 12 Ultrabook review: Haswell refresh adds performance

Dell’s XPS 12 Ultrabook Convertible is one of the better marriages of laptop and tablet. The version reviewed here, which Dell shipped over the summer, isn’t tremendously different from the original XPS 12: It’s slightly thinner and a little lighter, but it’s powered by one of Intel’s new Haswell-class processors. That update helps the new XPS 12 deliver better performance and much better battery life than its predecessor offered.

This machine’s key feature is a 12.5-inch touchscreen with a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels that pivots inside its aluminum frame—just as on the original. Open the lid, and you can use the computer as you would any other notebook. You simply push the top front or bottom back of the display to pop it out of its frame, and then flip it over and close it to convert the machine into a tablet.

ROBERT CARDINThe aluminum frame around the pivoting display is stronger than it looks.

The configuration we tested consisted of an Intel Core i5-4200U processor, 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory, and a 128GB mSATA solid-state drive. It posted an excellent Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 296, and the Windows log-in screen appeared in just 9.2 seconds. Tested battery life was a cool 6 hours, 49 minutes: That’s enough for a coast-to-coast plane ride with time to spare, and it’s 2 hours longer than the battery life of the first XPS 12 we reviewed, which used an Intel Core i5-3317U CPU.

The XPS 12 still relies on integrated graphics, so don’t expect to play hard-core games on it. Dirt Showdown played at 44 frames per second at 1024-by-768-pixel resolution and low visual quality, but you’ll need to drop most games down another notch for smooth play. Video looks superb, and the system easily handled high-bit-rate high-definition video. If you want to use an external display, you’ll need a Mini DisplayPort cable (the beauty of DisplayPort is that you can buy adapters for any other type of display, including analog VGA for when you need to use an old-school video projector).

ROBERT CARDINThe redesigned model is thinner and lighter than the original.

Although Dell has reduced the XPS 12’s weight to 3.35 pounds (the earlier model weighed 4 pounds), it’s still too heavy to hold in one hand and use as a tablet for any length of time. Dell also needs to outfit the XPS 12 with better sensors for detecting the screen’s orientation. I often had to pick up the unit and manipulate its angle before it would rotate to the correct orientation.

Dell’s XPS 12 earned an excellent Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score, although its gaming subscores were low.

I have no complaints about the XPS 12’s excellent backlit keyboard. Being a writer, I consider keyboards to be a big deal, and I wish every laptop had one that felt as good. The layout is spacious, the keys are slightly sculpted, and the feel is nothing short of fantastic. The touchpad and touchscreen are also nicely responsive.

The XPS 12’s audio system is better than average for its class, too. The low-end emanating from the speakers is more low-mid punch than thump, but I could pick up the bass in the intro to Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil,” a frequency that stymies many portable devices.

Battery life is excellent at 6 hours, 49 minutes.

The XPS 12 has just two USB 3.0 ports, one of which is always on for charging devices such as a smartphone or a digital media player. A headset jack and a built-in dual-array mic sit next to the webcam for videoconferencing. The machine has no hardwired ethernet, but this is one of the few laptops we’ve seen to boast an integrated 802.11ac adapter (Intel’s dual-band Wireless-AC 7260, which also supports Bluetooth 4.0 and Intel’s wireless display technology).

The Dell XPS 12 is well equipped, fast, and fun to use. Like most convertibles, it’s better as a notebook than as a tablet.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks.
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Lenovo ThinkPad T431s review: A high-priced Ultrabook without the high-end specs

LENOVO, INC. ThinkPad T431s $1,209.00 Lenovo's pricey new entry into the Ultrabook market caters deftly to business users, but it fails to deliver most of what's good about Ultrabooks: speed, portability, and convenience.

Lenovo’s long-standing tradition of producing black, boxy, boring laptops continues with the ThinkPad T431s, and it’s a testament to their underlying quality that businesses and business users continue to embrace them. But the company might want to rethink the “Ultrabook” suffix tacked onto this one's name, which conjures images of sleek, sexy, and speedy machines. The T431s is none of those things.

Rather, it has the heft and bulk of a more traditional laptop, weighing 3.6 pounds and measuring 0.8 inch thick. One suspects Lenovo could have squeezed in an optical drive, though at least the system leverages its large chassis to pack in plenty of expansion options: ethernet and VGA ports, a Mini DisplayPort, a 4-in-1 memory card reader, and a Smart Card reader for organizations that still rely on them. It also has a fingerprint reader, another nice security-minded perk. The system has only two USB 3.0 ports (three would be better), but one of them is powered so you can charge a mobile device even when the ThinkPad is off.

The T431s ranks among the slower Core i5–equipped Ultrabooks we’ve tested.

Like a growing number of laptops, the T431s lacks a drive-activity indicator. And although Lenovo included an LED for the Fn-key lock, the Caps Lock key didn’t get the same simple amenity. That’s inexcusable from a company known for great keyboards.

Indeed, this ThinkPad’s comfortable, backlit, perfectly spaced keys make typing a pleasure. It also has dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, though they’re not grouped together. That’s a mild annoyance; a bigger one is the bottom-left corner placement of the Fn key. Most touch-typists’ fingers are accustomed to finding a Ctrl key there.

ROBERT CARDINLenovo's ThinkPad T431s is a relatively thick, heavy, and slow Ultrabook.

Lenovo has redesigned its touchpad. This one is appreciably spacious and smooth to the touch, with buttons in all four corners. The top two are intended for use with Lenovo’s trademark pointing stick, which seems downright quaint today, but its presence will undoubtedly please longtime ThinkPad users. The entire touchpad is also a button, and that “give” can be awkward at times, especially if you land a little harder than you anticipated with your finger. To avoid accidental cursor clicks, you’ll need to develop a light touch.

ROBERT CARDINThinkPads are known for their sturdy construction, and the T431s is no exception.

With its Worldbench score of 121, the ThinkPad ranks among the slower Core i5-equipped Ultrabooks we’ve tested. The Sony VAIO Fit 15 posted a higher score, and the 128GB SSD in the Dell Latitude 6430u helped it earn a significantly higher result. The ThinkPad has a quick 7200-rpm, 500GB hard drive augmented by a 24GB SSD cache.

The ThinkPad T431s was only slightly faster than the Asus VivoBook S550CA we use as a notebook reference point. (Click to enlarge.)

Despite having only a three-cell battery, our review unit managed to last 4 hours, 45 minutes in our rundown test, which is about average for systems in this class. Like other Ultrabooks, the T431s has a nonremovable battery—a potential problem for business travelers who must swap in a spare power pack when the first one runs dry.

The ThinkPad’s 14-inch screen has native resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels. That’s sufficient for enjoying HD movies and other video, but it’s shy of the 1920-by-1080 displays offered by other Ultrabooks (such as the Samsung Series 9). What’s more, we expected a laptop in this price class to include a touchscreen, but the T431s lacks one. On the plus side, the screen exhibits very little glare, and Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 4000 supplies enough horsepower for stutter-free full-screen video (at least based on what we streamed from Hulu and YouTube).

As Ultrabooks go, the ThinkPad T431s is far from the skinniest, lightest, fastest, or longest-lasting model you can buy. And without perks like a touchscreen and solid-state storage (the latter is available on other configurations), it’s hard to justify Lenovo’s higher-than-average price. Business users might continue to appreciate the ThinkPad’s sturdy design, security features, and comfy keyboard, but others will find more features and better performance for less money.

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Toshiba Kirabook review: The first Ultrabook with a higher-than-HD touchscreen

Toshiba Kirabook i7 Touchscreen $1,999.99(Lowest Price) The Kirabook looks the part of a luxury laptop, and it’s the first Ultrabook to compete with Apple’s Retina lineup. But Toshiba made some disappointing decisions on the way to a $2000 price tag.

Toshiba's luxurious Kirabook is the first Windows laptop to feature a display rivaling Apple’s Retina technology. The Kirabook is also thinner and much lighter than Apple’s MacBook Pro, and it’s outfitted with a touchscreen. While I wish I could report that Toshiba has crafted a masterpiece that fully justifies its $2000 price tag, this machine suffers from a couple of significant flaws.

With a native resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, the Kirabook’s 13.3-inch display delivers a pixel density of 221 pixels per inch—just shy of the 227 ppi that Apple packs into the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s 2560-by-1600-pixel display. If you think Apple’s computers are overpriced, consider the fact that a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 3.0GHz Intel Core i7-3540M processor sells for $100 less than the Kirabook, which runs on a 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3537U CPU. Apple, however, doesn't currently offer any full-blown computers with touchscreens (the iPad doesn't count).

Like many touchscreens we've seen, the Kirabook's is highly reflective.

Clock speeds aren’t everything, of course. The processor that Toshiba picked boasts a TDP (thermal design power) of just 17 watts, versus the 35-watt TDP of the chip that Apple uses. (Thermal design power refers to the maximum amount of power that a computer’s cooling system must dissipate. A lower TDP is desirable for a mobile computer, because it improves battery life. In our test, the Kirabook’s battery lasted an impressive 5 hours, 14 minutes.) The Kirabook’s other key components include 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. I’ll get into the Kirabook’s performance in depth later.

Toshiba is rightfully proud of the rigidity of the Kirabook's magnesium-alloy chassis, but…

Photos, movies, and documents look gorgeous on the Kirabook’s display. But when I compared the Kirabook to a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (Apple doesn’t offer its high-res display on its thinner, lighter MacBook Air line), I found that Apple’s product delivered far better contrast. Both machines rely on the Intel HD 4000 GPU core integrated into the CPU, so I don’t know whether the Kirabook’s problem is due to Toshiba’s choice of Corning Concore glass (which is specifically formulated for touchscreens) or due to the fingerprint-resistant coating on the glass. Whatever the reason, it was no contest: The Retina display produced much deeper blacks.

The Kirabook (top) weighs 2.97 pounds and measures 0.7 inch thick. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (bottom) weighs 3.57 pounds and measures 0.75 inch thick.

Toshiba’s touchscreen is very responsive, and since it supports ten touch points it accepts all Windows 8 gestures. But Toshiba made a serious mistake by outfitting the Kirabook with only an HDMI video output. If you connect the notebook to a big-screen monitor, the maximum resolution you’ll get is 1920 by 1080 pixels. Had the laptop’s designers specified DisplayPort, the Kirabook would have been able to drive a 27-inch display at its native resolution. I get it: HDMI is the most common digital video input on modern TVs and video projectors. But DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapters are dirt cheap and easy to carry. Limiting the Kirabook to HDMI-out cripples the system for desktop use.

Toshiba is rightfully proud of the rigidity of the Kirabook's magnesium-alloy chassis, but the lid housing its display flexes enough to do the limbo. It feels alarmingly fragile. The other half, which encloses the keyboard and motherboard, feels remarkably strong considering how thin it is. The machine weighs only 2.97 pounds, and it measures just 0.7 inch thick when closed. The Kirabook is one of the prettiest laptops I’ve seen, with nary a hard edge to be felt. Unsightly features such as cooling vents and speaker grilles stay hidden while this Ultrabook is in use.

Toshiba's engineers should be proud of their ability to render the Kirabook so quiet with vents that are all but invisible when the machine is running.

The Kirabook’s backlit keyboard offers very good tactile feedback, and its monolithic touchpad—which also supports Windows 8 gestures—tracks smoothly and accurately. The left and right mouse buttons are integrated into the touchpad itself, helping to keep the overall design clean and elegant.

In addition to HDMI-out, the Kirabook has three USB 3.0 ports, a media card reader, and a combo microphone/headphone jack. It lacks a hardwired ethernet port, however. Exacerbating that problem is Toshiba’s decision to use Intel’s Centrino Wireless-N 2230 Wi-Fi adapter, which is limited to networks operating on the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band. Come on, Toshiba, this is supposed to be a luxury offering!

As you’ve probably guessed, the machine has no optical drive. The Harman/Kardon audio system, though, sounds much better than I expected, generating relatively full-range sound and a wide stereo field from the speakers’ left and right locations on the bottom of the unit.

The tiny Harman/Kardon speakers sound much better than I expected.

The Kirabook achieved a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 284, versus the 100-point score of our reference notebook, Asus’s VivoBook S550CA. Much of that performance delta can be attributed to the Kirabook’s SSD (the VivoBook has just a 24GB SSD acting as a cache for a 500GB mechanical hard drive). The Kirabook also delivered better performance in most of the other tests that make up the WorldBench suite, but those differences weren’t nearly as dramatic as the storage-performance results. And you shouldn’t expect to play hard-core games on either system, but that’s clearly not the audience Toshiba is going after with this product.

The audience Toshiba is pursuing with the Kirabook is the well-to-do professional who is willing to pay extra for services such as dedicated, United States-based telephone tech support. Toshiba goes so far as to guarantee Kirabook buyers that such calls will be answered within 45 seconds. If that’s inconvenient, you can schedule a date and time when a tech-support person will call you, instead. And should you need to send your unit in for repairs during its two-year warranty period, Toshiba will pay for overnight shipping.

Toshiba should have outfitted the Kirabook with a gigabit ethernet port.

The Kirabook is the most beautiful Ultrabook to pass through the PCWorld Labs, but its inability to drive a large external monitor at native resolution, a lid that flexes like a contortionist, a Wi-Fi adapter restricted to 2.4GHz networks, and a display that doesn’t deliver as much contrast as the Retina display Toshiba wants consumers to compare it to make this machine’s sky-high price tag hard to swallow.

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ASUS Taichi Hands-On: Two Screens, One Windows 8 Ultrabook

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Samsung Series 5 NP535U3C Review: AMD Takes on Intel's Ultrabook

It's only 0.7 inch thick, and it weighs just 3.35 pounds (3.8 pounds with power block), but the 13.3-inch Samsung Series 5 NP535U3C doesn't qualify as an Ultrabook. The reason? "Ultrabook" is a trademark belonging to Intel--and the Series 5 NP535U3C doesn't use an Intel processor. Instead, it has a 2.1GHz dual-core AMD Fusion A6-4455M processor. The crucial question: Can this ultrathin, AMD-based ultraportable laptop hold its own in an Ultrabook world? We tested it to find out.

Our review model, priced at $699 (as of August 6, 2012) as configured, sports an AMD Fusion A6-4455M processor, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and a 13.3-inch screen. It also offers 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a built-in 1.3MP webcam. The Series 5 runs a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.

Performance

Diehard AMD fans will be saddened to learn that the Series 5 NP535U3C doesn't quite match the performance of its Ultrabook counterparts. In PCWorld's WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, the Series 5 earned a rather puny 62 out of 100, meaning that it's speed was only 62 percent of our testing model's. The average WorldBench 7 score for the most recent three Ultrabooks we tested was 127.7.

To be fair, the WorldBench 7 tests take more than just processor speed into account, so components other than the AMD processor may share responsibility for the Series 5's poor showing. For instance, a major factor in WorldBench 7 tests is storage and startup speed; and one Ultrabook requirement is speedy boot-up times, which many Ultrabooks accomplish by using a small SSD caching drive plus Intel’s Smart Response technology. This Series 5 doesn't have an SSD cache drive, so its startup time is comparatively slow (31.4 seconds versus 12.3 seconds for the much speedier Acer Aspire S5).

But some WorldBench 7 tests stress processor speed. In our Office Productivity tests, for example, the Series 5 managed a mark of just 950, while the Aspire S5 earned a score of 4039. And in our Web Performance tests, the Series 5 sustained 6.8 frames per second versus the Aspire S5's 12.8.

The Samsung Series 5's graphics performance was somewhat stronger, thanks to the integrated AMD Radeon-class GPU. In our Crysis 2 graphics tests, the Series 5 managed frame rates of between 11.3 (at high quality settings and 1366-by-768-pixel resolution) and 24.5 (at low quality settings and 800-by-600-pixel resolution) frames per second. This frame rate was slightly higher than the average for the last three Ultrabooks we've tested. All of the laptops we're comparing, including the Series 5, rely on integrated HD graphics.

The Series 5 has a disappointingly short battery life. In our tests, we managed to eking out a scant 5 hours, 2 minutes in our tests; all three of the most recent Ultrabooks we've tested held out for more than 6 hours.

Design: Chassis, Keyboard, Trackpad

The 13.3-inch Series 5 model that we evaluated looks a lot the rest of Samsung's Series 5 lineup. It has a solid, slate-gray aluminum cover with a small, understated Samsung logo. The muted gray aluminum of the interior is just a few shades darker than that of the Apple MacBook Air. The minimalist keyboard deck contains a small power button in the upper right corner, speakers just above the keyboard, and tiny blue lights at the front for Wi-Fi, power, and battery.

The keyboard and trackpad are comfortable to use, but they have some of the same drawbacks as those on the Samsung Series 5 Ultra, which I reviewed in March. The keyboard's widely spaced, island-style matte keys are very quiet but offer weak feedback. The trackpad is smooth and accurate, and it supports multitouch gestures such as a surprisingly responsive pinch to zoom. The two discrete mouse buttons below the trackpad, however, feel flimsy and cheap.

Port selection on the Series 5 is adequate for an ultraportable laptop. On the left side are a gigabit ethernet port (which pops out, to avoid disrupting the machine's slim profile), a USB3.0 port, an HDMI-out port, a combination headphone/microphone jack, and a mini-DisplayPort. On the right side are two USB 2.0 ports and a four-in-one card reader.

Screen and Speakers

The Series 5's 13.3-inch matte LED-backlit display has a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. The screen features SuperBright Technology, which in our assessments appeared to live up to its name: The screen was quite bright, making it is usable even in very harsh lighting. Colors seemed accurate for the most part, though whites occasionally took on a bluish tint; text and images looked crisp. Off-axis viewing angles, especially the vertical angles, were poor, however, and viewing the screen from a less-than-optimum position yielded darker, contrasty images.

High-definition video looked reasonably good on the Series 5. Not everything was entirely smooth--especially in higher-definition streaming clips--but artifacting in video clips seemed to be limited to darker, fast-moving scenes, and choppiness was minimal.

The Series 5's speakers, though not very loud, produced very full sound, considering the size of the system.

The Bottom Line

You shouldn't write off the Samsung Series 5 NP535U3C just because it has an AMD processor instead of an Intel processor. Though Intel's Ultrabooks may outperform the AMD Series 5 overall, the Series 5's integrated Radeon HD 7500G graphics are slightly more impressive than Intel's HD 4000 integrated graphics. In addition, theAMD Series 5 is $100 cheaper than its Intel counterpart, and it has excellent speakers for the category.

So if you're looking for an ultraportable multimedia machine--and you're not too picky about startup time or branding--the Series 5 deserves a look.

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Vizio C14-A2 Ultrabook Review: Elegance in Minimalism

If Walter Gropius could see the new Vizio C14-A2 Ultrabook, he’d probably approve. It sports a sleek, metallic elegance, like many of the quintessential Bauhaus designs. And as the Bauhaus school would do, Vizio stripped out seemingly essential features, but the end result is a compact, lightweight, usable laptop that performs well and looks good. It also sells for a very reasonable $1199.

Lean and Stripped Down

At first blush, the C14-A2 seems mostly distinguished by its lack of features. Just two USB 3.0 ports are included, one on each side. A lone HDMI port is on the right side, providing the only video output port. The system lacks a wired ethernet jack, and doesn’t include a USB-to-ethernet adapter, as similarly thin Asus Zenbook UX31E. Perhaps the one absent feature that people might really miss, though, is a flash card reader.

Stripping out those features allowed Vizio to create a very thin, curvaceous laptop that looks equally good closed or open. The system looks thinner than it really is, thanks to its beveled, dark rubberized base, but it’s still very thin, at 0.63 inches. Vizio even left out keyboard backlighting in pursuit of slenderness—the hardware needed to integrate backlighting would have added 1.5mm.

As with the Macbook Air, the C14 and its larger sibling, the C15, is built using aluminum unibody construction. However, a black bezel surrounds the display, which tends to bring your eye to the LCD panel rather than to the surrounding bezel.

The keyboard is equally striking in appearance. The keys are big, every so slightly sculpted and beveled. The large touchpad is one in a new, unified style with no visible buttons, and supports multitouch gestures.

Performance

Looking good is one thing, but does the C14-A2 deliver on performance? This particular C14 is the A2 model, which ships with a Core i7-3517U processor. The dual-core 3517U includes 4MB of L3 cache, supports hyperthreading (so it can handle four simultaneous threads), and ships with a base clock of 1.9GHz and a maximum turbo speed of 3GHz. As with many similar Ultrabooks, it has 4GB of DDR3 memory, some of which must be used as the frame buffer for the integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU.

Performance is close to a dead heat with the highly rated, but pricier, Acer Aspire S5. The Vizio has an overall performance score of 81 on PCWorld’s demanding suite of tests, versus an 82 for the S5.

A thin-and-light system like this is often used for office applications and on-the-go Web duty. To that end, the Vizio posted very good scores in the PCMark 7 office productivity tests compared with other systems in its class, eking out a slight win over the Acer Aspire S5.

On the other hand, it looks like the Vizio’s solid-state drive is a bit slower than the Acer's, but it’s still an SSD, so it's speedier than Ultrabooks that use traditional hard drives.

As you might expect, gaming is not the C14’s strong suit. Intel’s HD 4000 integrated graphics is improved over past Intel efforts, but that still translates to subpar scores in most demanding 3D titles. We saw playable frame rates at only the lowest detail levels, and at 800-by-600-pixel resolution.

In the end, the C14-A2 maintains parity with the more expensive Aspire. While it costs more than equivalent Core i5-equipped Ultrabooks like the Toshiba Satellite U845-S406, the Core i7 CPU combined with the 256GB SSD makes for a speedy user experience. Note that lower-cost models of the C14 are available with smaller SSDs and lower speed processors. As with many extremely thin and light systems, tested battery life is less robust, at 5 hours, 17 minutes. While this is close to the Acer’s 5 hours, 28 minutes, it’s below the average of 6-plus hours for other Ultrabooks.

Connectivity and Usability

Having only two USB 3.0 ports, no physical ethernet connection, and just one output port puts the C14 squarely in Macbook Air territory. Apple at least includes a flash memory card reader for the Air, something the C14 lacks. However, the C14 is Bluetooth capable, so you can use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse if you want external input capability without consuming a USB port. Dual-band 802.11n support is included, a welcome addition. If a system is going to rely only on Wi-Fi connectivity, dual-band is a must for best throughput.

The lone HDMI-output port supports HDMI 1.4a, so it can handle even high-bandwidth devices. A dual-purpose headphone/microphone port is built into the left side. The headphone amp tends to distort a bit at high volumes, even with very good headphones. The built-in speakers are the weak point, sounding a little thin and inaccurate. Vizio includes SRS Premium Sound, but the equalizer settings seem a little off. In a switch from my normal preferences, I liked the sound from the built-in speakers better with SRS off, though audio through my Sennheiser HD 580 headphones sounded better with SRS enabled.

Video quality is something of a mixed bag. While color rendition appeared fairly accurate, the overall impression seemed slightly muted in tone. The display can be dialed up to eye-gouging brightness, should you need it. I saw visible shifting of color and contrast when viewing off-axis to one side, though the shifts were not too bad. Vertical viewing angles vary—looking from the top down results in severe image degradation, but bottom-up viewing is less washed out. Normal office use and photographic editing worked well, and the 1600 by 900 pixel screen and its 14-inch (diagonal) size were welcome.

I took a little time to adapt to the keyboard. The depth of the key presses are very shallow, something I generally don’t like, but the overall tactile feedback and sheer phyicsal size of the keys substantially made up for the shallow keystrokes. There is no visible PgDn / PgUp cluster, but the Fn + arrow keys handled this feature, as is the case with many ultraportables. The F1 key default state is to take you to Vizio’s support site. When I launched it, I was immediately notified that an update for the touchpad driver was available. That driver update improved touchpad usability a bit, enabling stronger palm detection and fewer wild cursor swings. Overall, typing and pointing were positive experiences, but a little more texture to the keys would have been welcome.

The touchpad also supports edge detection, making it ready for Windows 8. Sliding your finger off the edge will bring up the charms bar in the Windows 8 interface.

Traveling with the C14

The C14 sports a 14-inch screen, and is exceptionally light for that class of display. The Vizio weighs a scant 3 pounds, 7 ounces without the power brick. With the PSU, it weighs in at 4 pounds, 4 ounces. That’s substantially lighter than a number of Ultrabooks with smaller screens. The power connector is an oblong shape, which connects at right angles to the system and lights up when charging.

The C14 is also exceptionally quiet. A vent is built behind the hinge, so warm air exhausts straight out the back, not onto your lap. I fired up Google Chrome with over 20 Flash-heavy tabs running, and the fan didn’t kick in. When the machine was running PCMark 7, the fan finally fired up, but overall noise levels were pretty low—far more muted than the Sandy Bridge-equipped Macbook Air I often use.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the Vizio C14-A2 is a distinct pleasure to use, but it’s not perfect. I would still like to see a built-in memory card reader. The lack of an ethernet jack isn’t a deal breaker, and we’re likely to see more of these compact systems that eschew wired connections. The keyboard and touchpad are quite usable, though there’s still some room for improvement in pointing behavior. The display is good, not fabulous, but its size and resolution are welcome. Perhaps most disappointing is the overall sound quality of the speakers, given Vizio’s background as a consumer electronics provider.

Still, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts. Vizio’s first entry into the PC business makes a bold design statement, getting many things right, and the misses are near-misses, rather than thuds of disappointment. The whole affair feels solid, looks good, types well, and performs like a champ. What more could you want in a PC?

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ThinkPad X1 Carbon First Test Results: This Ultrabook Means Business

Like the ThinkPad X1 before it, the X1 Carbon is built for durability as it has passed 8 differe MIL-SPEC tests, including those which measure the ability to operate at extreme temperatures, altitudes and when being hit by sand. Like other ThinkPads, it has a roll-cage, but this time the cage is made from lightweight carbon fiber rather than magnesium. The X1 Carbon certainly felt durable in our testing as we were able to hold it by the deck with one hand, without feeling like the notebook would slip.

In order to make the X1 Carbon so thin, Lenovo has jettisoned several important ports. In particular the lack of an Ethernet connector will irk some business users. In many locations, wired Internet is much more reliable than wireless. Fortunately, Lenovo includes a USB-to-Ethernet dongle which solves this problem, as long as you remember to bring it along.

The notebook is equipped with a mini DisplayPort for video out, a 4-in-1 card reader and an audio jack, but just two USB ports, only one of which is USB 3.0 compatible. Business users with older projectors will definitely miss having a VGA port. Despite the limited space, Lenovo somehow found room for a hardware Wi-Fi on/off switch, which just duplicates functionality that’s available in Windows already. We would have preferred a third USB port or Ethernet.

The X1 Carbon’s 1600 x 900, 14-inch matte display is truly stunning. Using our light meter this ThinkPad’s screen registered 290 lux, which is even brighter than the 1400 x 900 MacBook Air’s 268 lux mark. However, the ASUS ZenBook Prime and its 1920 x 1080 display returned a much stronger measurement of 423 lux.

When we watched a 1080p QuickTime Trailer for SkyFall, images were sharp and detailed while colors were vibrant, though not quick as rich as on some other notebooks we’ve tested. Viewing angles were excellent; colors didn’t wash out at all, even at 90 degrees to the left or right.

The bottom-mounted speakers provided clean audio that was just loud enough to fill a small room at maximum volume. When we listened to both the bass-heavy “Forget Me Nots” and the guitar-laden “Basketcase,” sound was good quality was good enough to substitute for a low-grade stereo. Certainly, the Dolby v. 4 Home Theater software helped, particularly when we switched it into music mode. However, when we tried using the notebook on our lap, the speakers became just a little bit muffled.

The X1 Carbon’s island-style keyboard looks just like those on the recent ThinkPad T430 and W530, but it feels quite a bit shallower. Perhaps because the chassis is so much thinner, Lenovo had to sacrifice vertical key travel, which is a shame. Overall, we enjoyed typing on the keyboard and loved the feel of the comfortable, soft-touch palmrest under our wrists, but there is no doubt that it is not nearly as responsive as the keyboards on its thicker brethren. Even the MacBook Air’s keyboard seemed to have more depth and stronger feedback.

As with other ThinkPads, the X1 carbon has two different pointing devices. The TrackPoint pointing stick is incredibly accurate and comfortable, just as it is on every other recent ThinkPad. We highly recommend the stick because it provides the most accurate means of navigating around the desktop and allows you to move your pointer without taking your fingers off of the homerow.

Those who prefer a touchpad will like the large 4 x 2.4-inch glass touchpad. Unlike Lenovo’s other touchpads, which recently have had textures, this pad has a completely smooth surface that feels so smooth that sometimes we found our finger sliding around a bit. However, the pad was incredibly accurate and, despite its integrated buttons, it displayed none of the jumpiness we’ve seen on some other clickpads. Multitouch gestures like pinch-to-zoom and three finger swipe were smooth, but two-finger rotate only worked some of the time.

The Thinkpad X1 Carbon stayed pleasantly cool throughout our tests. After streaming a video for 15 minutes, we measured the touchpad at 77 degrees, the keyboard at 85 degrees and the underside at 92 degrees Fahrenheit. We consider temperatures below 95 degrees comfortable.

With a 1.8-GHz Core i5-3427U under the hood and integrated graphics, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is good enough for productivity tasks like crunching spreadsheets and transcoding videos. On PCMark 7, a benchmark that measures overall performance, the X1 Carbon scored a solid 5,297, well above the 2,854 Ultraportable average. This score also beats the 13-inch MacBook Air (4,380), which has the same CPU and the ZenBook Prime UX31A (4,989).

The 128GB SanDisk SSD booted into Windows 7 in a slow 56 seconds, 12 seconds behind the category average and way slower than ZenBook Prime (23 seconds) and the Fujitsu LifeBook U772 (27 seconds). The drive took a modest 1 minute to complete the LAPTOP File Transfer test, which involves copying 4.97GB of mixed-media files. That’s a rate of 84.8 MBps, which is about 50 percent faster than the 56 MBps category average, but slow for an SSD.

The SSD-powered MacBook Air completed the test at a rate of 159 MBps while the Fujitsu LifeBook U772 managed a rate of 121.2 MBps.

When it comes to perfoming productivity tasks, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is no slouch. It took a mere 5 minutes and 37 seconds to complete the LAPTOP Spreadsheet Macro test, which involves matching 20,000 names with their addresses in OpenOffice calc. That time is significantly faster than the 8:08 category average, but still behind the 2.6-GHz Core i5-3320M-powered ThinkPad X230 (4:29) and the 1.9-GHz Core i7-powered ASUS ZenBook Prime (4:59).

Just forget about gaming on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. With its integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics, it scored just 517 on 3DMark11, a synthetic graphics benchmark. That’s way below the 814 category average and the 624 offered by the MacBook Air.

When we tried playing World of Warcraft on the X1 Carbon, it managed a barely-playable 29 frames per second on autodetect settings and an unplayable 14 fps with the special effects turned up. Those rates are worse than the 46  / 23 fps category averages.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon feels really good on our lap, it has an excellent screen, solid sound and accurate pointing devices. Though the keyboard doesn’t offer the level of feedback we expect from ThinkPads, it is one of the best Ultrabook keyboards around. What will really make or break this notebook is its battery life, which we have yet to test. Lenovo says to expect up to 7 hours of endurance, but our battery test tends to produce results that are below manufacturer’s claims. Stay tuned for our full rated review.

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

The Samsung Series 5 Ultra is the company's first foray into the Ultrabook market (if you don’t count the Series 9, 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.

Ultrabooks 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 Ultrabooks. 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.

You won't find much on the keyboard deck of the Series 5 Ultra--just a small silver power button, a moderately roomy touchpad with two discrete buttons, and, of course, the full-size Chiclet-style keyboard. The keyboard is fairly comfortable to type on, though the matte-black keys are a little small and give slightly weaker-than-average feedback.

The touchpad is less impressive: It's smooth but not very sensitive, and the buttons feel cheap. In fact, on our test unit the left mouse button appears to sit lower than the right one, and feels as if it will break after a few months of normal usage. The touchpad supports multitouch gestures, such as pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scrolling, but the results are somewhat jumpy and inaccurate. For example, when you try to scroll with two fingers, Web pages jump up and down erratically instead of moving smoothly.

A thin, silver bezel surrounds the Series 5 Ultra's matte 14-inch screen. At the top of the bezel is a webcam, complete with a pinprick LED that indicates whether the webcam is turned on (in other words, exactly the way Apple's MacBook Air is set up). The screen looks pretty good. It has a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels, which is a little low for a 14-inch display. By comparison, the Asus Zenbook UX31E has a native resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels, and a 13.3-inch screen. Likewise, Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air has a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels--but, of course, its screen is smaller.

The Series 5 Ultra's screen is extremely bright at its brightest setting (perfect for working in direct sunlight), and color representation is mostly accurate, though colors sometimes look washed out. The screen's temperature seems a little on the cool side, which means that whites occasionally take on a bluish tint. That effect is hardly noticeable, however, unless you turn the brightness up and look at a mostly white screen.

In PCWorld's WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, the Series 5 Ultra performed well for its category with a score of 95. This means that the Series 5 Ultra is only 5 percent slower at general computing tasks than our baseline reference PC, which has an Intel Core i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card.

The Series 5 Ultra didn't do quite as well in our graphics tests, as it relies on Intel's integrated graphics technology. In our Crysis 2 graphics test, the Series 5 Ultra spit out only a wimpy 23 frames per second (low quality, 800 by 600 resolution). The machine did better in our Dirt 3 test, with frame rates ranging from a decent 40 fps (low quality, 800 by 600) to a not-so-decent 13 fps (high quality, 1366 by 768 pixels).

Samsung's Series 5 Ultra may not be a gaming machine or even a multimedia powerhouse, but it does have a DVD-RW drive, which is more than any other Ultrabook can say. Video looks good on the Series 5 Ultra, though high-resolution content occasionally suffers from artifacts such as blocks--especially in motion-heavy scenes--and general choppiness. The speakers, located along the top of the keyboard, produce loud but thin and bass-less sound.

Here's the thing: Samsung pitches the Series 5 Ultra as the first Ultrabook to sport an optical drive. But it's not, because it's not an Ultrabook. Sure, it may (barely) hit the 21mm thickness mark, but it contains a hard disk drive (along with a cache SSD for speedy startup) and it weighs 3.9 pounds. Don't get me wrong, this is a decent ultraportable laptop--it's just not at all what I think of when I think "Ultrabook." Still, if you're looking for a small laptop with more ports and functionality than an Ultrabook, the Samsung Series 5 Ultra is your machine.

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