Review: Samsung Series 7 Chronos

While not quite an ultrabook, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos boasts a good deal of functionality while still remaining light enough to carry around. At a recommended retail price of R14 299, it's no cheaper than its streamlined cousin, the Samsung Series 9.

The Samsung Series 7 has an executive look and feel, with smooth, shiny surfaces. The top of the laptop is made out of brushed aluminium, while it a plasticky base.

In some ways, the Series 7 looks like a thicker Series 9, also making use of a recessed, aluminium keyboard area to protect the screen. However, the Series 7 breaks from the unibody design of the Series 9.

My favourite feature of the Chronos is the large, backlit keyboard, which feels more like a normal desktop keyboard with its wide, easy-to-press keys.

The track pad was a bit of a sore point - despite having multi-touch support, it was incredibly unresponsive. About the only thing that worked was the two-finger scrolling, while simple navigation is practically crippled on this particular pad. The cursor control is haphazard, either frustratingly slow or jumps about the screen, often clicking of its own accord or dragging objects around, refusing to let go of them and accidentally depositing them in random locations.

This may be attributed to Samsung integrating the left and right click buttons at the bottom of the track pad, but I eventually just gave up and plugged in a USB mouse.

The Series 7 comes preloaded with Samsung's Easy Settings, which provide quick and simple access to some of the features users may want control of on this particular laptop, for example, the ability to preserve the overall battery life by limiting its maximum charge to 80% capacity, as well as an economy mode for running 'silently'. It also gives users feedback on their power consumption and CO2 output.

Samsung's Fastboot function is facilitated through the use of an 8GB solid state cache separate to the primary hard drive. This drive stores and handles important system files, applications and even documents currently in use, rather than having to use the comparatively slow HDD. Samsung advertises this ExpressCache feature as an improvement over a single solid state drive, as the integrity of one's data is still preserved on the traditional hard drive. ExpressCache technology provides an elegant bridge between the high costs of super-fast solid state memory versus the slower performance of spinning disks.

The Series 7 runs on Windows 7 Professional and also comes preloaded with other Samsung staples, the Software Launcher (a lot like Apple's Dock), Easy File Sharing (Apple's Airdrop), a semi-interactive Customer Support feature, Software Manager, Interactive Guide, as well as Samsung's own backup and restore software.

The Series 7 laptops are pushed as high-performance machines, and while they aren't the fastest around, one would be hard-pressed to find something as sporty under the hood for the same price. The Chronos has a quad-core i7 processor with a healthy 8GB chunk of fast DDR3 RAM, a 1GB Radeon 6750M graphics card, and a 500GB ExpressCache-enabled hard drive.

The Chronos has a generous supply of inputs and outputs, including USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, as well as an Ethernet port, a dual-purpose audio output and input, an HDMI output, dual-purpose 3.5mm audio in/out jack, as well as a DVD drive, which is probably only useful to South Africans who rent DVDs and don't have a dedicated DVD player.

Under normal usage, the Chronos will last almost seven hours without a power supply.

The Series 7 has the usual tinny sound produced by laptops, so those wanting to use this machine to listen to their tunes best utilise the audio input.

The display, while advertised as being SuperBright, is less than impressive. I found it hard to read the display in a bright room. The screen also needs to be viewed from exactly the right angle or the solarisation is so extreme that text on documents disappears entirely.

That said, the display supports HD graphics and has a 1600x900-pixel resolution.

I would recommend the Chronos to anyone who wants a powerful machine and is happy with its price tag. Those in the market for a word processor that allows for occasional video consumption will probably opt for a cheaper machine.

The Series 7 packs a lot of power with its i7 processor and the ExpressCache-enabled hard drive, but I can't help but wonder why Samsung didn't throw in a solid state drive?