You may have followed the worldwide reveal of the Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite with us on June 20th in London, but today Samsung is starting to take pre-orders and announces the in-store availability of this computer on July 28. If you are not yet familiar with the ATIV Book 9 Lite, it is a 3.48lbs AMD-powered laptop (quad-core, 1.4GHz) that comes with a 128GB SSD drive, 4GB of RAM and a 13.3” (1366×768) touch display – all for a $799.99 price, which is rather eye-catching.
In terms of Industrial design, the ATIV Book 9 Lite uses the same design language as the ATIV Book 9+ (June 2013) and Samsung Series 9 (2012). I’ll have more specifications for you below, but there are a few things that you can’t really see from the specs sheets, like the fact that the laptop’s display can tilt back to a 180 degrees angle which can be very handy for some touch-enabled applications and when you use it on your lap in a plane.
With the ATIV Book 9, Samsung will be introducing its SideSync technology for the first time in this product and upcoming Samsung PCs (it’s not supposed to work on non-Samsung PCs, unfortunately). It allows one to connect a Samsung laptop to an Android smartphone so that the phone can be controlled from the laptop.
In “virtual phone” mode, your smartphone screen appears as a widget inside Windows, and it is effectively a “remote desktop” for the Android device, but it also goes beyond that: it is also possible to drag and drop files to and from the smartphone directly from Windows.
In “screen sharing” (or side-by-side) mode, your mouse and keyboard extend to the smartphone display and let you copy/paste from the PC to the phone in apps like Whatsapp (and any other) which are not available in Windows.
Users can control everything on their phones and use any apps, including games, although the framerate may not be sufficient for racing games and FPS shooters. At the moment, Samsung is demonstrating this functionality with a USB tethering setup, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t eventually work over a wireless protocol. Interestingly enough Samsung’s wording doesn’t seem to exclude this from working on non-Samsung Android phones. We’ll see.
Samsung ATIV Book 9 Specifications
| Details | ATIV Book 9 Lite |
| Display Size | 13.3” |
| Resolution | LED; 1366 x 768 |
| Brightness | 250 nits |
| LCD | 10-point capacitive touch-screen LCD |
| OS | Windows 8 |
| Processor | Quad Core Processor (up to 1.4 GHz) |
| Graphics | AMD Radeon™ Graphics |
| Memory1 | 4GB DDR3 |
| Storage2 | 128GB SSD |
| Camera | 720p HD |
| Battery Life3 | Up to 5.5 hours (MM12) |
| Dimensions | 12.76″ x 8.82″ x 0.69″ |
| Weight | 3.48 pounds |
| Color | Mineral Ash Black or Marble White |
| Ports | Mini VGA, Micro HDMI, |
| 1 x USB 2.0, 1 x USB 3.0, | |
| 3- in-1 (SD/SDHC/SDXC), Headphone/ | |
| Mic combo | |
| MSRP | $799.99 |
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