Samsung updates Series 3, 5 and 9 laptops: Ivy Bridge, USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 4.0 on select models

Shawn Knight

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Samsung held a press conference in New York to announce updates to their Series 3, Series 5 and Series 9 notebooks. In addition to updates across the board, the electronics giant also used the event to launch two new Series 5 systems.

Existing Series 5 and Series 9 systems will be getting the third generation Ivy Bridge processor treatment from Intel. 13- and 15-inch Series 9 systems will also receive Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity and lose 0.1-inches in thickness but otherwise the notebooks remain largely unchanged. Series 5 notebooks will also get Bluetooth 4.0 as well as USB 3.0 while the lower end Series 3 line will see new dual-core Sandy Bridge processors. Current systems in this class ship with Pentium processors so moving to dual-core Sandy Bridge parts is a nice improvement.

samsung series computex series 9 series 5 series 3

The first of two new systems is the Series 5 500 which starts at $800 and includes a 14-inch display operating at 1366 x 768, a 500GB hard drive, 8GB of RAM and a Core i5-3210M Ivy Bridge processor.

The larger 15.6-incher retails for $100 more but comes with a Core i7-3610QM processor under the hood, 8GB of system memory and a higher capacity 750GB hard drive. There are also JBL speakers complete with subwoofer to further along the “entertainment” agenda. Both computers will ship with an Nvidia GT 630M GPU.

The company will start taking orders for the new systems later this month.

Image credit: Tom's Hardware

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From the picture it looks like they are doing the keyboard right (with the full width numpad zero key) but the screen doesn't look like it is a matte IPS display. Notebook manufacturers really have to step up their game in this regard.

I would hope the new 15" model comes with a kepler 660M and optimus. If I'm buying a laptop to game occasionally with, that is the GPU minimum that I would need. If I'm buying a laptop just to surf the internet with, then I might as well just get the Asus UX31 with the top quality IPS matte display. Anything in between is a compromise for virtually everyone - you know this is true.
 
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