It's unusual for a major computer manufacturer to release stuff early, but Samsung is releasing its January 2011 models now -- we got a first look.
The guys from Samsung Australia dropped into the APC offices to show off their new range of notebooks – going on sale early next month. Their press kit came with some hilarious "lifestyle" pics of the notebooks in use, like this guy with the white suit in the room with the Miami Vice poster (ok, we admit, we put the poster in...), and the guy having his suit tailored while using his notebook.
Samsung's biggest successes to date in the notebook market have been with its very good value netbooks -- but the company is pushing out to a broad range of mainstream notebooks in 13", 15" and 17" sizes.
The company is making some distinct statements with this range – one model comes with a 2GB dedicated graphics chip for serious gaming; one model has taken quite obvious design cues from Apple's MacBook Pro (and hey, if it looks good on one relatively expensive notebook, we can't see anything wrong with applying the design to more affordable notebooks). There are models with huge built-in lithium polymer batteries that offer a claimed seven hours of continuous run-time, and there's a very distinctive model that is styled after … a shark.
All the models have some actually useful-looking software preloaded on them: Samsung Allshare, which streams video, pictures and music to other Samsung DLNA devices. Why did Samsung make this app? Because DLNA is one of those "standards" that every manufacturer has implemented a bit differently, so it very rarely works as it says on the box. Samsung decided it could, at the very least, make all Samsung stuff work seamlessly with DLNA streaming. It will, of course, also attempt to work with other DLNA servers.
Another cool feature shared across all the models is a proprietary chip which gives you a three second sleep resume -- with the ability to recover fully from a completely run-out battery. It sounds a lot like Apple's "Smart sleep" -- it always writes out a memory image to the hard disk when you sleep the notebook, but maintains power to RAM anyway and resumes using sleep mode if you have battery life remaining. This is definitely superior to Windows' standard hibernate mode, which takes ages to sleep, but also takes ages to resume as the entire contents of memory have to be copied from disk into RAM.
We have tones of pictures of all the angles of each model -- so do check em out in the galleries below.
Samsung's "Shark" notebook packs a curious design
Samsung's QX notebooks borrow styling from MacBook Pro
Samsung's RF notebook: it's a Range Rover, damn it