Review: Samsung Series 7 Chronos 14-inch

When it's time to shop for a new laptop, everybody wants an ultrabook. But few remain quite so excited when they see the often-limited performance and inflated price tags.

Samsung's solution: Jam a standard, 14-inch laptop into what is essentially an ultrabook case, giving you (in theory) the best of both worlds.

The 14-inch Series 7 Chronos does look like just another ultrabook. Its footprint (12.8 inches x 8.8 inches) is actually smaller than the 13-inch MacBook Air's (at 12.8 x 9.0 inches). But thanks to its super-skinny bezel, Samsung has squeezed a full 14-inch LCD into that space. The display doesn't cut corners, either: At 1600 x 900-pixel resolution, the screen gives you a huge playground to work with, and it's very bright, to boot. Also, just to confuse you, the Series 7 Chronos also comes in several 15.6-inch versions under this same model name.

Specs look good: a 2.4GHz Core i5 processor, a 750GB hard drive, 6GB of RAM, and switchable graphics so you can go integrated or turn on the ATI Radeon HD 6490M.

Unfortunately, the Chronos didn't really show up for our benchmark tests. Scores were middling, and I experienced more than my fair share of lag and delay when launching apps and waiting for complex tasks to complete. The Chronos made up for some of its issues on graphics tests, though, with surprisingly solid framerates on most games – two or three times what you'd see with an ultrabook. Available ports include HDMI, a flip-out Ethernet port, two USB ports (one 3.0, one 2.0), SD card slot, and a mini-VGA port (including dongle).

The Chronos borrows more from the ultrabook world than just the form factor: The large, buttonless clickpad and backlit island keyboard are stock gear for ultras. The backlight effect on the keyboard, which has the exposed sides of each key light up along with the character on top, is especially impressive.

What's not to like? In a word, stability. The Chronos was especially crash-prone, probably in part due to a surfeit of shovelware with a propensity for pop-ups. Samsung also claims a proprietary caching system aids with boot and load times. It shaved about 15 seconds off the machine's boot times, but it didn't do much for app loading. In fact, all the hangs made me suspect it was causing more trouble than it was worth. The clickpad is touchy and flaky, too, missing far more clicks than it should have.

At 4.6 pounds, the Chronos 7 occupies an abruptly unfilled niche between 3-pound ultrabooks and 6-pound 15.6-inch laptops. It's too bad Samsung didn't ratchet performance up along the way.

WIRED Is a better feature set worth an extra pound and a half? I think so. The slot-loading DVD is so well-integrated that I didn't even realize it was there until accidentally hitting the eject button on the keyboard. Nearly $500 cheaper than Samsung's Series 9 ultrabook.

TIRED Ultra-flat keyboard makes touch-typing surprisingly difficult. Average, unimpressive general app performance. Crash-prone. Could use an extra USB port or two. Weak battery life (barely 4 hours under load).

Photos: Ariel Zambelich/Wired