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Why Samsung’s X360 Is The Ultralight The MacBook Air Should Have Been

Late last week at the IFA Consumer Electronics trade fair in Berlin, Samsung announced its new X360 ultralight, ultrathin laptop aimed directly at the MacBook Air's wheelhouse.

Built around Intel's new Centrino 2 technology, the X360 will be available with a variety of 45nm Penryn II Core 2 Duo ultra-low voltage processors running on an 800 MHz front side bus, equipped with one GB of memory standard (upgradable to 4 GB), and use Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator X4500 graphics core, which dynamically annexes system memory and is claimed to offer substantially better performance than the GMA X3100 technology used in the current MacBook Air.

The X360 has a 13.3", 1280 x 800 LED-backlit glossy widescreen display and a passel of I/O ports including 3 USB ports, a built-in HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) connection that allows 100% transmission of visual and audio digital signals, an Express Card 34 slot and VGA video output. For fast and easy transfer of documents, images, video or music it has a 7 in 1 memory card reader, and 10/100/1000 Ethernet, plus Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and 802.11n wireless connectivity technology. There is also an integrated 1.3 megapixel digital motion camera, Headphone-out and Mic in ports plus an integrated mic, and if that's not enough it's dockable with support for Samsung's P-Dock docking station – which simplifies cabling and provides a 'single click' connection and easy access to a wide variety of ports easy access to a wide variety of ports, including Serial, 5 x USB, LAN, HDMI, SIO, e-SATA and DVI (Digital Video Interface, for extra connectivity. As with the MacBook Air, there's no built-in optical drive.

If you're at all familiar with the MacBook Air's spec. profile, then after reading even this far it should be obvious that the Samsung X360 boasts a number of qualitative strengths in contrast to the Air's manifold practical shortcomings, but in case you're a bit hazy on that, here's a recap:

The MacBook Air's problem is not with it's undeniably sleek and attractive design, but rather with what went missing in order to pare that weight and thickness down, plus the fact that even battery replacement requires the case to be opened by professional techs - at least if you don't want to void the warranty.

The MacBook Air comes with a respectable 2 GB of RAM soldered to the motherboard, but unfortunately that's also its maximum RAM capacity. There is no RAM expansion slot.

THe standard hard drive in the base model is a non-standard 1.8" (iPod-type) unit of a modest 80 GB capacity and 4200 RPM rotation speed, with the only upgrade offered being an even smaller 64 GB flash drive. There is no provision for hard drive upgrades, so if 80 gigs isn't enough, you're up the creek so far.

There's No FireWire, not even an option, and not much else in the way of other I/O ports either - just once lonely and grossly overworked USB 2.0 port flanked by a headphone jack and a Micro-DVI video port. That's all folks. That USB port has to handle pretty well all peripherals you might need to use - the optional external SuperDrive optical drive, the optional Ethernet connector, a microphone if you need one, external keyboards and mice, printers and scanners, a modem if you need one, and so on. There are no expansion slots of any sort. Built-in sound output is only a mono speaker. With no FireWire, there is no FireWire Target Disk Mode, although expanded wireless features are intended to take up some of that slack.

Apple claims up to five hours runtime on a battery charge, but real-world reports put it at more like 3 1/2 hours, and if that's enough for your needs, you're out of luck. The battery is not user-switchable, so you'll have to wait until you find an AC outlet and through the recharge interval. MacBook Air battery replacement requires sending the machine to Apple, costs $130, and takes 5 business days.

In short, the MacBook Air is compromised in just too many ways - the paucity of ports, lack of FireWire, the small, slow hard drive (heck, I have a 100 GB drive in my old Pismo PowerBook), the limited RAM capacity, the non user-replaceable battery, and so on and so forth, all piling up against it as a satisfactory replacement for the erstwhile and much-lamented 12" PowerBook and rendering it a non-contender as a serious pocket workhorse Mac.

The Samsung X360 doesn't have FireWire either, but on pretty well all other counts cited above, it mops the floor with MacBook Air, and does it weighing in at 1.27 kg when it's fitted with a 64GB or 128GB SSD and the standard six-cell battery - that's actually just a smidge lighter than the MacBook Air's 1.36Kg weight. Samsung is claiming that the X360's removable 6 cell battery can provide up to 10 hours continuous use but more like six hours' "real world usage" battery life. The X360 even has a secure biometric fingerprint and trusted platform module authentication system, another thing not available on the MacBook Air.

Samsung says the X360's Protect-O-Edge casing is built using magnesium alloy to provide high strength and top-notch reliability coupled with good ergonomics and premium styling, and while not quite as spectacular-looking as the MacBook Air, it's a very attractive small laptop, and it's conventional-type keyboard appeals to me more than the oddball Apple "chiclet" design.

Samsung has a vertical integration advantage of being able to design, build and source its own hardware components, including memory, batteries and display screens, not to mention SSDs.

Speaking of which, Samsung claims that the optional 128GB Solid State Drive offers boot times 25-50 percent faster, and data access times 300 percent faster (53 MB/s) for reading and 150 percent faster (28 MB/s) for writing than standard hard drives.

Somewhat quirkily, the X360, at least for the Asian and European markets, incorporates what Samsung calls "Silver Nano Technology," embedding nano-sized silver ion powder in the keyboard for anti-bacterial protection. Whether this feature will ever make it to North America is an imponderable, since a damper to say the least was put on the antimicrobial input device market last March when the EPA fined ATEN Technology, Inc., of Irvine, CA, peripherals-maker IOGEAR's parent company, $208,000 for selling "unregistered pesticides" and making "unproven claims" about their effectiveness.

“We’re seeing far too many unregistered products that assert unsubstantiated antimicrobial properties,” Katherine Taylor, associate director of the Communities and Ecosystems Division in EPA’s Pacific Southwest region, is quoted commenting, “Whether the claim involves use of an existing material such as silver, or new nano technology, the EPA takes these unverified public health claims very seriously. Consumers should always follow common-sense hygiene practices, like washing hands frequently and thoroughly.”

There are also potential environmental issues associated with release of silver nanoparticles into the environment. See:
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=5966.php
and
http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=5559.php

Pricing for the X360 hasn't been announced yet, but has been projected at a range of €1200 to €2000 in Europe beginning this month, which will make it somewhat more expensive than the MacBook Air.

In short, the Samsung X360 is, if not everything, at least most things the MacBook Air should be but isn't. To paraphrase Bare Bones Software's slogan, "it doesn't suck," while the MacBook Air, despite its aesthetic charm, does in too many ways.

Of course the downside is that you can't run the Mac OS (at least legally) on the Samsung X360, but desktop Linux is getting better all the time, and if I had a need for a subnotebook workhorse computer as a road-warrioring work tool, I would find the X360 awfully tempting, and the MacBook Air not at all. Something for Apple to chew on, and serious subnotebook fans can only hope that the rumors of a subcompact MacBook Pro have some substance.




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cmoore@macopinion.com

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