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Comment by chopsueyar | Hacker News Reader

I just checked out this Samsung Series 9 ($1618):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004NF3Z82/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

This one has 13.3" LED display, 128GB SSD, sandy-bridge dual core 1.4 GHz i5, 4GB ram, WiMax 4G support, and a USB 3.0 port.

It is 2.88 lbs and .62 inches thick.

The MacBook Air 13" model has a 1.86Ghz processor, but a Core 2 Duo, and with 4GB ram and a 128GB SSD, it is $1399.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...

It weighs more at 2.9lbs and is .68 inches thick at the hinge area. The front is only .11 inches thick.

Minus the ability to develop for iOS, the $200 difference seems pretty fair.

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I bought one of these in Australia, ridiculously overpriced ($2500), but I got it on sale for close to US RRP. although I'm mostly happy with it, I think I would have waited or bought something else if I had the chance. It has some strange quirks, like the system not registering holding down the power button during a kernel panic. The solution seems to be putting a paper clip in a pinhole on the bottom while it is unplugged (otherwise it stays on). Then it will turn off and refuse to boot until you plug it back into the power. In all other circumstances holding down the power button works perfectly. The fact that they put the pinhole there seems to infer it was intentional or that they knew about it long before the design work was finished.

There has also been a lot of talk about how the broadcom wireless has bad performance, both in linux and windows. It is a half-size mini pcie card, and I have yet to find a good one to replace it.

How did you learn about the pinhole?

When I first realised that it wouldn't respond to the power button, I did what I would normally do on any other device - search for a pinhole. At first I didn't find one, but a later investigation found it. I don't know if it is a good or bad thing that consumer electronics have taught me the 'search for pinhole' behaviour.

If it interests anyone, it is located on the button, near the right flip-out port.

Pinholes FTW. How is the performance and usage otherwise?

I never ran it with windows, so I only know about linux. At first I had quite a few graphics crashes (although, not full kernel panics, so I was able to still use the power button). These seem to be because sandybridge is still so new.

About a week after getting it I noticed a dead red subpixel, luckily samsung have a 14 day zero dead pixel warranty, so I was able to get it replaced from the store I bought it from. I haven't had many crashes since then, but I also updated the kernel to 39 around the same time, so I'm not too sure what caused it to get better (I used the same linux installation from my old laptop).

The touch pad is a pleasure to use, unlike the ones on previous laptops I've used. Battery life would be 3-5 hours depending on load. The keyboard backlight seems to stay on when the lid is closed, I haven't looked into ways to control it on linux yet. The mini-hdmi plug will be a bit annoying, especially because the one adapter I bought doesn't fit (need to get out the metal file, make the adapter slimer). I'm also not sure where I'd get another ethernet adapter (seems to be a custom job).

Am I the only one tat disagrees with this? I really wanted to like the Galaxy Tab that I got from Google I/O and at first glance it was awesome, but after actually using it during a complete day I noticed several, extremely annoying software-related problems; The gmail app stopped accepting scrolling events, I had to reboot the tablet several times and the OpenGL drivers were, let me say this, pure crap. As far as the Samsung Series 9, a pure spec to spec comparisson without seeing the system from a holistic point of view (software + hardware) is a must in this consumer market. We are not in 1997 anymore, having to put a paperclip through a pinhole to make the power management work should be considered a FAIL for the entire system, sorry.

If I had realised this kind of stuff before I bought it, I wouldn't have got it. I don't run the windows that comes with it, but I've read that the software is a bit flaky and not many updates have arrived yet.

Have you upgraded the tablet to 3.1 yet? The upgrade became available for I/O tablets as of last Friday. I had the same issues you talk about with mine, specifically the Gmail scrolling issues and some really infuriating rendering & touch event bugs in the browser.

But that seems to be an issue with whatever cobbled together version of Android 3.0 that was on the pre-release devices. The difference under 3.1 is like night and day in terms of stability. I find the device extremely usable now and I enjoy it more than I do my iPad.

It has been sitting on my shelve after two weeks of honestly trying to like it. I will upgrade it to 3.1 and see if it gets better...

I wish I had known about that pinhole before. After my last kernel panic I waited for 5 hours to let it run out of battery.

How has your experience with Linux been? Any X crashes or bad wireless performance? If you have had these problems, what version of the kernel were you running?

The wireless performance and connectivity is really horrible. I blame the proprietary driver for that, tough.

Since I followed the workaround described here [0], I'm not getting any more Xorg crashes. However, I suffered from very high graphics-related latencies, which required another workaround described in [1].

The only, but very nasty, issue left are very random complete system freezes. The power button continues to work, but I have no idea where they come from.

Right now, I'm running 2.8.38 again. I tried some .39 releases, but had various issues with them. The 3.0 release candidates did either reboot immediately due to some known UEFI bug or the touch pad and keyboard did not work.

[0]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input...

[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/761065

Did you end up getting EFI to work? I tried, but the efivars module wasn't creating the right sysfs devices. Then I couldn't get lilo working on GPT, so I had to reformat to MBR.

I never had anything like that in the links you gave. I had X freezes, where I could usually hit the power button once, and the computer would shutdown normally. If magic sysrq keys worked correctly, I could just use raw mode (the reboot magic combination never seemed to work). I also had many kernel oops from Divide Error, which would cause ksoftirqd to go 100% cpu until the computer froze a few minutes later. So if things seem laggy, I have a habit of checking to see if this is occurring, then I can restart normally before the crash.

All of these crashes haven't happened recently, however. The strangest thing I am seeing at the moment is Battery acpi signals, when there is no reason for why they should be triggered.

I also just ordered an atheros ar9382 to replace the wireless card. I may lose bluetooth, but I don't even have the relevant programs installed at the moment. I would say the wireless was okay while I had signal, but would go horrible when it got a little distance away.

The installation with Ubuntu Natty was as painless as it could be. Grub2 with EFI support worked right away. What distribution/kernel combination are you using?

I had a few strange kernel oopses with 2.6.39 kernels, that seemed to be SATA related. That's why I downgraded back to 2.6.38.

Could you let me know whether your wireless replacement worked or not? Right now the bad wireless connectivity is the biggest issue I'm having.

I'm running Gentoo and 2.6.39. I tried elilo, but efibootmgr wanted a different sysfs structure to what was there from the efivars module. As for grub2 efi, I followed a few online tutorials but couldn't get it working. The wireless card will take a few weeks to get here, but it will work, just a new card.

By the way, I learned that there is a sysctl to force your laptop to restart after a kernel panic.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/auto-reboot-linu...

Wow, that read like a product advertisement. I wasn't very surprised to see see that your link includes a affiliate tag :)

All joking aside, I have one of these laptops and they're just great:)

It's $1499 if you get the one without WiMax: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-NP900X3A-A03US-13-3-Inch-Lapto...

Nice.

Don't forget the matte screen on the Samsung Series 9 laptops. And keep in mind the rumours about a refresh of the MBAs on the upcoming days/weeks with sandy bridge (thus i5?).

Edit: And I forgot the screen resolution which is better on the MBA (1440x900 against 1366x768, the same as seen on MBA 11").

Funny I did the same comparison last night, but concluded the Air was superior. 1440x900 screen is the big differentiator. Samsung also makes an 11" model, but it's a first gen i3, which doesn't have the graphics oomph to compete with a NV 320M. (Samsung claims Sandy Bridge and HD3000, but the part number listed is wrong.)

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