Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch - The First Windows 8 Touchscreen Ultrabook

Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch - The First Windows 8 Touchscreen Ultrabook

The 13.3-inch Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch is the first Ultrabook to be released with a multi-touch-enabled screen and Windows 8 Pro operating system pre-installed. Essentially an upgraded version of the Series 5 Ultra released earlier this year, the matte screen has been replaced with a glossy, 10-point multi-touch display. Other changes include a slightly darker grey finish, a brushed aluminum wristpad and the removal of the plastic bezel around the screen in favor of an edge-to-edge display. The Ultra Touch is also quite a bit heavier, weighing in at 1.73kg compared to the original’s 1.47kg, and is also about 2mm thicker, both mainly due to the touchscreen. Unfortunately, at that weight, it's not much of an "Ultrabook" for its form factor.

Beyond the touchscreen, you’re looking at a fairly standard Ultrabook build: 1366 x 768 pixels resolution, low-voltage Ivy Bridge Core i5-3317U (1.7GHz) processor, chiclet keyboard and 500GB HDD with 24GB Express Cache SSD. 

The Core i5 model we'll be reviewing today will be available on the same day as the Windows 8 launch (26th October) and will retail for S$1549 - about S$261 more than the first generation Series 5 Ultra. A Core i3 model has also been seen, but there are no details on availability or pricing yet.

Design Matters

The overall design is adequate, but not all that interesting or unique. The slightly darker finish does look a bit more premium than the previous Series 5 Ultra, and the brushed finish wristpad is a big step up from the plain grey plastic of the first generation model.

The original Series 5 Ultra featured a matte display (one of the few Ultrabooks available with such a screen), but the Ultra Touch has swapped that in for an extra glossy touchscreen panel. The screen itself is bright enough, but viewing angles could be a little better. As mentioned, the display is ultra glossy - in fact, it's one of the worst we've seen in terms of reflections. It's also a fingerprint magnet which isn't the best quality for a touchscreen display. 

We loved the keyboard on the original Series 5 Ultra, and the Ultra Touch keyboard is just as good. Samsung has really nailed the balance between feel and travel distance, with the keys being both firm and deep, and yet not too stiff or tall.

We were disappointed to see that Samsung did not take the opportunity to upgrade the trackpad to a clickpad on the Ultra Touch, sticking with the non-clickable model found on the previous Series 5. While the trackpad itself is fairly large, and handles multi-touch gestures quite well, most Ultrabooks these days come armed with clickpads, and it would have made navigating Windows 8 with the trackpad a bit more convenient.

Windows 8 on the Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch

Using Windows 8’s Modern UI on the Series 5 Ultra Touch is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the multi-touch display is very responsive, and accurately tracks up to five inputs at the same time. The screen itself is also very smooth and fast.

On the other hand, it soon became fairly obvious that a traditional clamshell notebook design just isn’t the best form factor for Windows 8. For a start, the hinge that opens and closes the notebook works against a touchscreen build, as even the lightest tap will result in the screen wobbling annoyingly. Note that the hinge itself is pretty normal for a typical notebook, but they weren't deigned for touchscreen usage in mind as it lacks rigidity. Additionally, the hinge limits the screen angle to about 45 degrees, which makes it hard if not impossible to put the display flat, preventing you from using many apps designed to be used this way (mainly drawing, painting and writing apps).

Secondly, while it may not seem like very far, reaching across the keyboard to touch the screen is fairly annoying, and actually gets quite fatiguing after a while. Ultimately, we ended up preferring the trackpad for navigating Windows 8 on this machine (and it's likely to be the same for most other touchscreen Windows 8 clamshell notebooks to come).

Utilities - Samsung Apps

While Samsung is first to market with its Windows 8 Ultrabook, more will be on the way soon. To help it keep its edge, Samsung has attempted to spice things up by bundling a few custom apps with the Ultra Touch, some of which you may recognize from its various Android products. Samsung’s Music, Video, Media and Social Hubs are all present and accounted for, as is the AllShare app, which helps you share content across different devices. Additionally, Samsung is including a few desktop applications designed to soften the learning curve for people new to Windows 8. For example, for those pining for the now-extinct Start Menu, the S-Launcher widget replicates that function.

Performance and Benchmarking

While the Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch is the first touch screen Windows 8 Ultrabook available, its specs are very similar to other Ultrabooks already on the market. To give you an idea of how it compares, we've selected Sony's VAIO T, which has slightly more RAM, but is otherwise very similar, as well as Intel's own reference Ultrabook. We've also thrown in the original Series 5 Ultra which is using an older Sandy Bridge processor.

PCMark 7

As we've seen in the past, the presence of an SSD drive hugely influences PCMark 7's scoring system. As such, the Intel reference Ultrabook with its full SSD drive is miles ahead of the competition. However, in actual user experience, while an SSD drive is obviously faster, the difference isn't as noticeable as the charts would make out. Having said that, for disk intensive operations like loading a complex game or heavy file transfers within the drive, the added speed advantage can be quite noticeable over a non-SSD equipped system, so it really depends on your usage behavior.

The overall PCMark 7 score for the Samsung notebook is somewhat consistent with the Sony notebook, but detailed results show that for some reason, the results vary from one sub-test to another. On the other hand, the other compared notebooks produced more consistent results. 

3DMark 11

The first generation Series 5 was running Intel HD 3000 graphics which isn't DX11 compatible and as such has been left out of this chart. As you can see, the Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch fared quite well, scoring on par with the Intel reference notebook that was running on a faster processor.

Far Cry 2

To find out how the notebook handled an actual game, we fired up Far Cry 2 and noted that Intel's HD Graphics 4000 engine provides quite a sizeable boost in performance when comparing the Ultra Touch to the old Series 5, making the Ultra Touch capable for more than just casual touchscreen games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope. Just like in 3DMark 11, the Ultra Touch was speedier than the Vaio T notebook in Far Cry 2 by quite a notable margin. So despite its shaky productivity scores, it actually held up pretty well in gaming tests.

Battery Life and Power Consumption

One of the key features of Ultrabooks is their great battery life. How will the addition of a touchscreen affect the Touch Ultra's battery life? As it turns out, the touchscreen didn't drain battery life like you might think. In fact, Windows 8 seems to require less power than Windows 7, and in combination with the more power efficient Ivy Bridge processor, the Ultra Touch managed to last an extra 50 minutes compared to the older Series 5 (running on a Sandy Bridge processor platform). It also lasted longer than both of our other Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks (and many others that we've compared previously), suggesting that Windows 8 does indeed require less power than Windows 7. As a result, its power consumption score was also excellent.

The more techie enthusiasts reading this article might still argue the fact that the difference in power consumption and battery life are solely due to the change in platform. We previously compared a HP Pavilion dv6 running on Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge platforms with nearly identical hardware other than the computing platform, and we noted about a 15% to 20% improvement in both power consumption and battery life. This time around, with similarly designed Samsung Series 5 notebooks, the Ultra Touch model registered a greater improvement of about 20% to 30%. The increased battery life and the fact that many other Ivy Bridge notebooks have garnered more mediocre battery performance, all point to the OS having a positive impact. Still, we'll revisit this topic of battery efficiency on Windows 8 in a future article.

Portability Index

Our portability index factors in battery life, weight and volume so you can see which notebook is the most worthwhile to carry around with you. It's an excellent comparison tool for notebooks within a same class/type. Despite the good battery life of the Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch, it didn't score all that well on our Portability Index due to its increased weight and thickness. Having said that, it was still respectable, with a ratio of over 2.1.

Conclusion

The Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch is the first of many touch-enabled Windows 8 Ultrabooks that will soon be available. While the addition of a touch screen sounds like a great extra feature for an Ultrabook, realistically, we found that the traditional notebook clamshell form factor isn't an ideal platform. First of all, due to the hinge, even the slightest tap will result in the screen wobbling. This isn't a problem limited to the Ultra Touch, as it will affect any clamshell notebook with a hinge (i.e. all of them). While this could theoretically be fixed with very stiff hinges, or possibly a locking design, realistically, that's not a likely solution. The hinge on this notebook also prevents you from using apps designed to be used on a flat surface, as it only allows the screen to go back about 45 degrees. Secondly, reaching across the keyboard to touch the screen gets fairly annoying, and can actually be quite fatiguing after a while.

All of this is not to say that Windows 8 isn't a good OS for an Ultrabook - it is, in fact, the clean Modern UI works very well on the 13.3-inch screen, and actually looks rather good even at the standard 1366 x 768 pixels resolution that this notebook ships with. It's just that, on a clamshell notebook, a touchscreen may not be the best way to navigate it. Actually, we found that the trackpad is more than sufficient, if not an ideal way to navigate Windows 8, and executing swipes, pinches and other gestures is just as easy as touching the screen (it actually requires less effort). Clicking on icons requires a little more effort in navigating than just touching them but, as a trade-off, right-click is far easier and faster to execute with a trackpad than a touch screen. 

If you also consider that the original non-touch screen Series 5 retails for S$1288, while the Ultra Touch goes for $1549, it might actually be a better idea to pick up a non-touch version and just upgrade it to Windows 8. Remember, you're not just paying more for the touchscreen, the Ultra Touch is also quite a bit heavier and slightly chunkier too. This added weight makes it it one of the heaviest 13.3-inch Ultrabooks around, and leads us to question its "Ultrabook" label, as honestly it feels closer to a standard notebook. Furthermore, given the current movement to adopt higher resolution screens, the Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch has not caught up in this aspect. 

It's still a decent notebook, but the added cost and bulk for this Ultrabook may not be everyone's cup of tea, despite its good battery life. If you do feel like you want that touchscreen for the full Windows 8 experience, you may want to consider waiting for one of the upcoming ‘convertible’ notebooks that can fold back onto itself for a tablet-like form factor, such as Samsung’s own upcoming Series 5 Ultra Convertible.

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