Take a beautiful Windows ultrabook design. Add a super-high-resolution touch screen and longer-battery-life Intel Haswell processor. What could be wrong with that?
Nothing at all. The Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus is a rebirth of the Book 9/Series 9, a laptop line we've loved for years because of its solid shape, slim design, and strong performance. Samsung's rebranding of Windows laptops to "Ativ" is a little confusing, as is the splitting of the line into two thin laptops: the Book 9 Lite and Book 9 Plus. The Lite, which I've already reviewed, is plastic, has an AMD processor, and is a different type of product, but costs around $750. The Plus is a far better ultrabook, but it's $1,399, nearly twice the price. It comes with what amounts to the New Standard in premium Windows ultrabooks: a greater-than-1080p 3,200x1,800-resolution touch screen, plus improved battery life thanks to a Intel Haswell Core i5 processor inside.
Do you pull the trigger on the more expensive ultrabook? I would. The Book 9 Plus is one of my favoriteWindows 8 laptops, feels great to use, and I'd pay a few hundred more for it, begrudgingly. Even the equivalently configured 13-inch MacBook Air, albeit with a lower-res non-touch screen, costs about $300 less. And other Windows laptops in this territory are available closer to $1,000.
Nevertheless, it's hard to beat the pure package that the Book 9 Plus offers. It might not convert to a tablet, but it sure is a sweet, but expensive, laptop.
Design: Perfected ultrabook
The Ativ Book 9 Plus is extremely similar to the older Book 9: gunmetal-blue on the outside, silver edges, a curved, tapered profile like an airfoil, and a footprint smaller than a 13-inch MacBook Air.
The Ativ Book 9 Plus is extremely similar to the older Book 9: gunmetal-blue on the outside, silver edges, a curved, tapered profile like an airfoil, and a footprint smaller than a 13-inch MacBook Air.
You can make an argument -- an easy one, in fact -- that the biggest thing holding back Windows 8 laptops is Windows 8 itself. Hardware manufacturers are clearly trying to do their best, but there's a decision to be made: design a flippy-convertible tablet-to-laptop beast, or just make a good laptop?
The Samsung Book 9 Plus opts for the latter path, and probably wisely so. It's heavier than the last Book 9/Series 9, weighing in at 3.2 pounds versus the sub-3-pound wonder it was previously. It's a little bit thicker, too, to accommodate the upper lid's new touch screen. You probably won't notice much; the last Book 9 was shockingly light, and this new model just feels normal.
Display: More pixels than you'll know what to do with
The last year has seen a lot of computers adopting high pixel-density "ultra-high-res" displays, higher than 1080p and boasting much crisper image quality. The improvements can be hard to appreciate: once you get over 1080p, the sharpness of text and image quality amounts to close-up detail more than jump-out clarity.
The last year has seen a lot of computers adopting high pixel-density "ultra-high-res" displays, higher than 1080p and boasting much crisper image quality. The improvements can be hard to appreciate: once you get over 1080p, the sharpness of text and image quality amounts to close-up detail more than jump-out clarity.
The Book 9 Plus wins the pixel arms race with a stunning 3,200x1,800-pixel 13.3-inch display; the Toshiba Kirabook clocks in 2,560x1,440 pixels, and the 13-inch Retina Display MacBook Pro has 2,550x1,660. That's phenomenal pixel density, and a huge leap from the 1,600x900-pixel display on the previous Book 9.
But, while that quality display is great for clarity and viewing high-resolution images, a lot of the value is theoretical, since many Windows 8 apps don't take advantage of this resolution yet, and it's unlikely your video diet will include content better than 1080p.
