Samsung's thing for (faux) leather continues with the ATIV Book 9 Style
Samsung's clearly been listening to Venus in Furs a lot recently, which explains why it's gone a bit crazy on the faux-leather all of a sudden. After covering both the Galaxy Note 3, Galaxy Tab Pro and Chromebook 2 in the stuff, the company has now sought to do the same to a member of its Windows notebook family. Having taken the recently refreshed ATIV Book 9 that we found at CES, this new model gains the fetish-friendly backing and, erm, not much else. We spent a few seconds with an engineering sample of this unit, and felt compelled to share our impressions with you.
Spec-wise, you'll find the same 15.6-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 display, Haswell Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD that was available in the base model ATIV Book 9. The keyboard was, broadly, the same, although on this model they felt a tad too spongy for our taste, but alas, the issue concerning the lack of travel remains unsolved. We liked the roomy trackpad, and imagine that the jitters we found while mousing around were merely teething troubles associated with the unfinished hardware. One of the things we were impressed with is the Sound Alive speaker tweaks, which made this slender 4.2-pound Ultrabook loud enough to drown out the din of construction that surrounded us. There's no word on how much this hardware will cost you, or when it'll arrive, but we'd imagine it'll be close to the price of the existing ATIV book - after all, that faux-leather can't be too expensive, can it?
