Samsung ships ATIV Smart PC Pro with AT&T LTE, 13-inch Series 9 Premium with 1080p screen

Samsung Launches ATIV Smart PC Pro with AT&T 4G LTE and Series 9 Premium Ultrabook with Full HD display

Latest Business-Ready Windows 8 Mobile PCs Deliver the Speed and Flexibility for Serious Mobile Professionals

Ridgefield Park, NJ – March 25, 2013 – Samsung Electronics America, Inc., a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd and the 2012 market leader in tablet PCs running Windows 7 or 8 according to IDC,[1] today announced the availability of AT&T 4G LTE capability with its ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T, its latest portable Windows 8 PC. In addition, the ultra-sleek Series 9 Premium Ultrabook features a sharper, clearer screen with its LED-backlit 1920x1080 full HD display, presenting up to forty percent more content than a 1600x900 HD+ display.

"With the introduction of the new professional ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T and the full HD resolution Series 9 Premium Ultrabook, Samsung is continuing its focus on innovation while delivering on the needs of a growing number of mobile professionals," said Tod Pike, senior vice president at Samsung's Enterprise Business Division. "Samsung is providing business professionals on-the-go with the necessary tools for increased connectivity, productivity and ultimately success."

Mobility and Performance with the ATIV Smart PC Pro

With the ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T, professionals receive the benefits of an ultra-thin tablet and a fully functioning PC in one stylish product. Enabled with AT&T 4G LTE connectivity, mobile professionals can easily stay connected and complete their work while traveling. The ATIV Smart PC 700T offers the full functionality and power of a clamshell PC with the increased flexibility and convenience of a tablet.

The ATIV Smart PC Pro comes with a detachable keyboard, 10-point touch capability and the Samsung proprietary S Pen™ for hand-written note taking. Samsung's innovative S Pen lets users take notes, sketch and send messages in their own handwriting, conveniently storing it in the tablet. The ATIV Smart PC Pro touts an 11.6" display and files are easily accessible with touch capability.

Samsung's ATIV Smart PC Pro provides the flexibility needed in a number of business settings, including sales and service, as well as healthcare. For sales and service field agents that work in more than one location, the model provides the flexibility required to complete work while away from a traditional office environment.

With the ATIV Smart PC Pro, professionals working in a healthcare setting are able to easily interact with patients and colleagues and take their notes wherever they go. Samsung's professional mobile PCs facilitate the adoption of electronic medical records.

For peak performance, the ATIV Smart PC 700T touts an Intel® Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM (Standard) and up to 8 hours of battery life.*

The Ultimate, Ultraportable Series 9 with Full HD

The Series 9 Premium Ultrabook with full HD resolution is the newest addition to Samsung's comprehensive portfolio of Series 9 business-ready products. It is the ultimate, ultraportable PC for mobile professionals as one of the thinnest and lightest ultrabooks on the market. With the latest edition, the Series 9 includes an LED-backlit 1920x1080 full HD display, delivering up to 40 percent more screen content than the standard 1600x900 HD+ display.

With the addition of full HD, the Series 9 enables individual professionals to make the most of commonly used business applications where more content can be displayed. In addition, the full HD LCD display provides sharp, high-resolution video in an ultra-thin form factor. Its SuperBright™ technology is up to 50 percent brighter than standard laptop screens, for more vivid colors.

As the ideal travel companion, the Series 9 is built with Samsung's PowerPlus charging technology and an advanced Lithium-Polyester battery for a lifespan up to 1,500 cycles, extending the product's lifespan up to three times longer than a conventional battery.* Users can achieve maximum efficiency with an Intel® Core i7 processor and a 256GB solid state drive delivering plenty of storage space. The Series 9 boots up to 60 percent faster than a hard disk drive-equipped PC.

The Series 9 Premium Ultrabook comes with a three-year limited warranty and Windows 8 Pro operating system and TPM. All of the models being introduced are powered by Windows 8, providing instant access to friends and colleagues, apps, sites and more.

Pricing and Availability

For a full list of retailers, call 1-866-SAM-4BIZ or visit samsung.com/business. Follow us on Twitter @SamsungBizUSA.

The MAP for each product is as follows:

· Samsung ATIV Smart PC 700T (XE700T1C-HA1US) = $1,599.99

· Samsung Series 9 Premium Ultrabook (NP900X3E-A03US) = $1,899.99

Key Specifications

ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T

XE700T1C-HA1US

Series 9 Premium Ultrabook

NP900X3E-A03US

* Battery life will vary depending on the product model, configuration, power management settings, applications used, and wireless settings. The maximum capacity of the battery will decrease with time and use. Test results based on independent third party MobileMark tests. Total amount of available memory may be less based on configuration.

** Accessible capacity varies; MB = 1 million bytes, GB = 1 billion bytes, TB = 1 trillion bytes. Please note that a portion of the hard drive is reserved for system recovery, operating system and preloaded content software.

*** All functionality, features, specifications and other product information provided in this document including, but not limited to, to benefits, design, components, performance, availability and capability of the product are subject to change without notice or obligation.

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By: Unknown On 8:52 PM

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Apple 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display now $1,499, new processors for Retina family and cheaper MacBook Air

Apple announced today that the price of its entry-level 13-inch 128GB MacBook Pro with Retina display has been cut to $1,499. Meanwhile, the model above (with a new 2.6GHz processor and 256GB of space) has been priced at $1,699. The bigger 15-inch MacBook Pros with Retina display, will also get their processors bumped up to 2.4GHz and 2.7GHz, respectively, while MacBook Air shoppers might want to make their purchase today, as the 256GB 13-inch MacBook Air has also been discounted to $1,399. All the new models (and prices) will be available starting today.

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Apple Updates Processors & Prices of MacBook Pro with Retina Display

CUPERTINO, California-February 13, 2013-Apple® is making the MacBook Pro® with Retina® display faster and more affordable with updated processors and lower starting prices. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display now starts at $1,499 for 128GB of flash, and $1,699 for a new 2.6 GHz processor and 256GB of flash. The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display now features a faster 2.4 GHz quad-core processor, and the top-of-the-line 15-inch notebook comes with a new 2.7 GHz quad-core processor and 16GB of memory. Apple today also announced that the 13-inch MacBook Air® with 256GB of flash has a new lower price of $1,399.

The MacBook Pro with Retina display features the world's highest resolution notebook display. Whether you're reading emails, writing text, editing home movies in HD or retouching professional photography, everything appears vibrant, detailed and sharp, delivering an unrivaled viewing experience. The MacBook Pro with Retina display features flash storage that is up to four times faster than traditional notebook hard drives, and delivers improved reliability, instant-on responsiveness and up to 30 days of standby time.

Source: Apple

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By: Unknown On 9:51 PM

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13-inch Retina MacBook Pro Review: So Good, But So Not Worth It

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As soon as Apple announced the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the countdown started for the 13-inch version. Well, here it is. A slim, trim, portable little MacBook with a gorgeous retina screen and a gut-punch cost. And another reminder that sometimes wonderful things don't live up to their price tag.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro has been the most popular Apple laptop for some time now, and rightly so. It just feels like exactly the right size, without the premium pricing for the anorexic thinness of the MacBook Air. Plus, it can handle heavier loads. And now it's got a gorgeous new retina screen.

But hold on. Slapping a retina screen on the Apple's most popular laptop is a recipe to sell a zillion laptops, sure, but the 13-inch MBP also has some Cialis-level performance issues that can't be glossed over with just an SSD and a bunch of pixels.

So why does it matter? Because a whole lot of people think this will be the exact right laptop for them, and there's some evidence that maybe it isn't quite.

As soon as you turn on the 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, its retina screen will ruin every other laptop screen for you. It's gorgeous. Everything—icons, text, even menu interfaces and notifications—absolutely everything looks like it got a full-body manicure from a rotary saw. Text, especially, is pristine.

If you haven't used a Retina MacBook Pro 15 before, you might end up confused. There are lots of pixels, right? So why isn't everything very, very tiny? In its default (Apple calls it "best") settings, the retina screen is tuned to scale to the same workspace size as a 1280x800 display of the regular 13-inch MacBook. That means for every "pixel", there are four actual pixels powering the display You can also select from four different scaled sizes, if you want to take advantage of the magnitude of pixels in the retina screen.

The Retina 13 still feels more like the Pro than the Air—especially when it comes to looks. It's a good bit thicker than a 13-inch Air, but also a tiny bit smaller than the previous Pro. The difference isn't as dramatic as it was for the 15-inch retina, though, so you don't get the sense of this being a radical new thing as much as an intermediary between the incumbent 13-inch Pro and Air.

To test graphics performance, we rendered the same video project—a small, random video file with some heavy effects added—on four separate machines. The Retina MacBook Pro 13, the Retina MacBook Pro 15, an older-but-souped-up Mac Pro, and a 2012 MacBook Air 11-inch. The results (full specs as tested below) were telling.

The older Mac Pro was the slowest, finishing each render just above 2 minutes. The Air was next, coming in just over a minute (1:05 average). That's where it gets interesting. The Retina 13 was just a few seconds ahead (54 seconds exactly, all five times), and the Retina 15 was 34 seconds. That's what you would expect going in, more or less, but with the Retina 13 costing $850 more than the tested Air, and just $200 less than the Retina 15, those gaps in performance are concerning.

Gaming was much the same. Running Diablo 3 at native resolution with effects on high was playable, sort of, but fps was consistently falling under 30. Things improved at lower settings (1866x1166 fixed most of the video lag), but to be clear, in no uncertain terms: You do not want this to be the computer you play games on if you care about gaming.

The build is a goddamn idealized MacBook. And there's a reason that most other laptop makers have been trying, with various degrees of success, to catch up with Apple's aesthetic for the past several years. It's not just the screen, though that's the central, wonderful part of it. It's the sum of many advanced parts—from the compressed unibody design to the still-awesome keyboard and trackpad to the blazing fast SSD. This is how computers should be.

The guts-based, pixel-chewing performance simply doesn't measure up. It's not just the graphics performance being too similar to a MacBook Air, or the minor but perceptible systemwide slowdown when you use a higher resolution setting. It's the way that you have to throttle back your expectations of what your laptop can crank out, the way you would while using a limited ultrabook. And for a lot of people, that's just unacceptable from a computer pushing three grand.

The color, though, was a little off in hi-res photos. Out of the box it was displaying a little too dark, and colors were too deep and saturated. Messing with color calibration cleared it up, but it's a definite annoyance in a machine aimed so squarely at visual professionals.

Here are the specs of the machines used in our render test: Retina 15: 2.3GHz Quad Core Ivy Bridge Core i7, 16GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, 251GB SSD, 122.47GB free, OS X 10.8.2; Retina 13: 2.9GHz Dual Core Ivy Bridge Core i7, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 4000 768 MB, OS X 10.8.2; MacBook Air 11: 2GHz Dual Core Ivy Bridge Core i7, 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000 512MB, OS X 10.8.2; Mac Pro: (Early 2008) 2x 2.8GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon, 34GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB, OS X 10.7.4Battery life in our gravel-chewing battery test (60 percent brightness, 20 Chrome tabs, half of which self-refresh, last one is a 100-hour Nyancat YouTube video) was 3 hours 15 minutes, which is a good number compared to 13-inch ultrabooks.Sound from the laptop's speakers was fuller than what you'll get from a small laptop most of the time, but it's got an echo to it that seems to be more prevalent while listening to dialogue than music.I use favicons as my Chrome bookmarks, and within minutes I'd started despising sites that still haven't updated to retina. Little things like that, or pixelated website logos or images, will take you out of your retina euphoria.If you've never used a MacBook before, the chiclet keyboard is extremely comfortable to type on (and remains slightly different form the Air keyboard, despite the smaller imprint), and the trackpad is still the best on any laptop.

This is probably the best 13-inch laptop you can buy right now, for all the good it'll do you. Sure, this computer makes some sense for a photographer or designer, but the 15-inch Retina offers almost all of the same benefits, plus a lot more if you can stomach a little less portability and a fractionally higher cost. Here's the thing about the 13-inch MBP's price: It would make sense if the 15-inch retina MBP weren't so much better. But it is. And for literally the exact same price as a moderately upgraded 13-inch (2.9GHz dual core i7, 256GB SSD), you can get a 15-inch rMBP with near-identical-but-also-way-better specs (2.3GHz quad core i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, GT 650M discrete graphics card). At the cost of some portability. That's it.

Or you could go with a Zenbook Prime, which has a drop dead gorgeous 1080p screen for two thirds the price and a lot of the performance (and also some trackpad issues, but hey!). Not to mention that the Air is due for a refresh on its displays soon. Maybe resolutions won't be doubled, as Apple has been doing, but if not retina, they'll 1080p at least. The point is, the rMBP 13 is wonderful, but it's not that much more wonderful than everything else. And certainly not as sky-high as its price would indicate.

All of which is to say, there are better, or just more sensible options either out now, or just off the horizon. So unless you've got an extra grand to blow on a screen upgrade for a MacBook Air, it's probably prudent to hold off on this for now.

Processor: Intel Ivy Bridge 2.5GHz Dual Core Core i5 or 2.9GHz Dual Core Core i7
Display: 13.3-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 (scaled to 1280x800 by default)
Memory: 8GB RAM
Storage: 128GB-776GB SSD
Ports: HDMI, 2 Thunderbolt, SD Card slot, 2 USB 3.0
Price: $1700-$3200
GizRank: 3.5

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By: Dilusha On 8:14 PM

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Review: MacBook Pro 13-inch with Retina display

We can't say it came as a surprise.

A 13-inch version of Apple's 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display has been rumoured since its larger stablemate was first released in the summer, and it seemed a pretty obvious move anyway.

Unveiled during Apple's October keynote, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display proved to be exactly what we expected; a smaller version of the 15-inch model, with the same innovations and departures from the regular MacBook Pro form factor.

Thankfully, it's also exactly what we wanted.

The Retina MacBook Pro is a new take on the notebook, breaking with the traditional MacBook Pro design in favour of a lighter, thinner notebook.

At three quarters of an inch thick and weighing 3.57 pounds, it's 20% thinner and almost a pound lighter than the regular 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Naturally, such a small body has forced a rethink regarding internal components.

The optical drive is gone, and instead of a bulky hard drive, solid state storage is used. This high-end model has 256GB, but there's also a cheaper version with 128GB.

This is the only difference between the two models.

The 13-inch model has the same connectivity outlets as the 15-inch Retina MBP, including high-speed USB 3.0 ports.

Off the shelf, the cheaper 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display costs £1,449 (UK) and $1,699 (US), with the more expensive version costing £1,699 or $1,999.

Custom options to increase storage to up to 768GB or upgrade the processor to a 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 are available if you order through the Apple online store.

Of course, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro's most exciting feature is its Retina display. Cramming in four times as many pixels as a standard 13-inch MacBook Pro (which itself is no slouch in the resolution department), it's absolutely gorgeous to look at, reproducing images and text with crystal clarity. Photographers, graphic artists and video editors will love it.

Like all of Apple's 13-inch MacBooks, this one lacks a discrete graphics chip. Instead, it relies on the Ivy Bridge processor's built-in Intel HD Graphics 4000 chipset.

Not that this is much of a drawback. Intel's integrated graphics have improved with every release; the Intel HD Graphics 4000 chipset is around 60% more powerful than the Intel HD Graphics 3000 used in the previous generation of Core-i processors.

Like all new Macs, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display comes supplied with OS X 10.8: Mountain Lion and its bundled applications such as the Safari web browser, iTunes, Calendar, Contacts and Mail.

Also bundled are the current versions of the iLife applications, iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.

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By: Dilusha On 7:43 PM

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