Samsung Series 5 Ultrabooks Debut

Samsung has revealed its latest ultrabook, the Samsung Series 5, a choice of 13- or 14-inch ultraportables packing 7s resume in a chassis as thin as 14.9mm. The new Series 5 notebooks pack a choice of up to 1TB of traditional storage (in the 14-incher; up to 500GB in the 13-incher) or a 128GB SSD, along with up to 8GB of RAM and even the option of an optical drive.

Samsung has outfitted the 14-inch Series 5 with an optical drive, the first ultrabook to be so equipped. Ports on both machines include ethernet and HDMI, while the 20.9mm-thick 14-inch model also has discrete AMD graphics with a Radeon HD7550M GPU. Both use an anti-glare screen coating for improved outdoor visibility.

To be fair, the 14-inch Samsung doesn't quite fit into Intel's ultrabook category. The chip manufacturer originally defined the segment as being under 0.8-inches thick (20.3mm), and as having solely SSD storage, and the larger-screened Series 5 is slightly too fat for that. Still, with the SSD, both Series 5 machines can resume from hibernation in under 7s, or from sleep mode in less than 2s.

Samsung will put the Series 5 up for sale in Korea at the end of December, priced at 1,290,000-1,490,000 won ($1,124-1,298) for the 13-inch and 1,340,000-1,540,000 won ($1,168-1,342) for the 15-inch. No word on international launch plans at this stage.