Samsung Chases Apple With New Ultrabooks

Samsung is entering the Ultrabook arena with its Series 5 Ultra, a lightweight and heavy performing notebook that could hurt Apple’s MacBook Air.

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Last year Samsung showed off its lightweight and uber-thin series 9 notebook. It was the most capable Windows notebook that had the skillset to threaten Apple’s MacBook Air, had it not been so expensive.

Today Samsung showed it has learnt from its mistakes.

The company’s series 5 Ultra will come in 13 and 14 inch variants and we expect the introductory model to hover slightly above the $1,000 price mark.

Both sizes will have a 1,600×900 resolution screen equipped with Samsung’s SuperBright technology, 128GB of SSD or a hybrid 500GB SATA drive and 16GB of ExpressCache Memory, and an array of fully-exposed ports. It will be available with a variety of Intel Core i processors.

The 14 inch model is a little more daring than other Ultrabooks as it includes an optical disk drive. By including a disk drive on an Ultrabook, Samsung (along with Acer who did the same yesterday) implicitly support the notion that in the not too far future, every new computer could have the same slender proportions of an Ultrabook.

The Series 5 will go on sale in January, but so far there’s no word on their Australian availability.