Samsung ATIV Book 4 NP470R5E Real Life Review

Samsung ATIV Book 4 NP470R5E: The review from real life

Prices of laptops these days seem ridiculously low when recalling on them few years back. The integrated components seem more badass, Hertz and Byte values are rapidly rising, zero-meaningful marketing features' buzz words are popping like popcorn on hot oil, and model designations of laptops have higher integers and more cool letters in them than ever. How is this possible? 

Hah, you know how. Now, let's see these ATIV Book 4 NP470R5E specs:

• Core i5 @ 2.60GHz.
• 8GB RAM.
• AMD Radeon HD 8750M + Intel HD Graphics 4000.
• Touch Pad with multi-gesture support.
• Keyboard keys with WHITE PRINTED LETTERS ON THEM.
• Other stuff.

How could things possibly go wrong with these specs? Ah, well...

My choice for next laptop was ATIV Book 4 NP470R5E, and I am a kind of a person which makes these kind of decisions only after reading about 753472350967 online reviews and endless forum discussions. I honestly cannot recall the factors and metrics I have used to reach the decision for buying this model, now that I have it. Seriously, I spent weeks online, ignoring my professional and social life, trying to make this decision and do it right, and now, after finally making a decision, I have no clue why exactly did I decide to buy specifically this model. What the hell?

Anyway, my conclusion is that most of the laptop models today (or phone... or tablets.. or anything really) are simply cheap, unreliable, plastic crap, cunningly and patiently waiting to die on you as soon as the overly short warranty expires. 

Samsung ATIV Book 4 The Good:

1. Pretty thin, but not the thinnest.
2. Pretty light, but not the lightest.
3. Pretty cheap for given specs, but.. not.. the..
   cheape..s..
   t.
4. Multi-touch, very responsive touchpad.
5. Solid battery mobility (you can even get >4 hours with light usage (docs, internet without multimedia) and low brightness setting. 
6. If you are not a hard core, but occasional gamer, this machine can handle some relatively newer games pretty well (for a laptop). If you need more details on this manner, please refer to some more serious reviews which lie openly to your face. 
7. Pretty quiet. You can manually silence the fan anytime (except while playing Crysis and having 10 RedTube tabs open and playing in the same time of course).
8. Full keyboard (numeric and all). Nice feeling to it too. But I imagine that some would say - too shallow.
9. They printed SAMSUNG in a really cool font on the case.
10. Deceivingly nice aluminium finish.
11. Screen is not reflective.

Samsung ATIV Book 4 The Bad:

1. Construction. Hinges. I have a constant unnerving feeling that it will break any second now. Unbelievably plastic and cheap. I thought that it was some kind of a joke when I first received it (previously I had ThinkPad, which is a damn tank compared to this squeaky toy).
   
   In fact, just relax for a minute and let me elaborate this horrible construction in a more detailed manner; imagine having a quail egg. Now, imagine that you are wearing a heavy-duty space marine battle suit and your exoskeleton gloves are giant and made of rough steel. Now you are trying to take the small fragile quail egg from a tiny metal box, while blindfolded, hanging on a thin rope, on a planet with gravity two times stronger than on Earth. And yes, the box is connected to a high voltage (let's round up on about 20.000V). Now, carefully take the egg out of the box and put it gently in your mouth through your battle suit helmet while singing ENTER SANDMAN in one octave higher pitch.
   ... That is the feeling I get when using this laptop's hinges.



2. Touchpad gets in the way when typing. I always mistakenly touch it with the base of my palm and screw up the writing, because automatically the location changes  of the cursor. it



3. It is SLOW as a turtle with imploded shield. Initially installed Windows 8 with bunch of preinstalled trash apps on the classic HD drive worked as a politician - a lot of background mumble, weak and rare real effects. Ridiculous considering the specs from space. And installing a touchscreen optimized OS on the touchscreen-less device is a really remarkable idea. Although things got better with SSD and freshly installed Windows 7, they did so not as much as I've expected - it is still too slow and crashing occasionally.



4. The display.
   My god, the display.
   This is hard for me to admit, but sometimes I want to cry when looking at this display.
   It is terrible.
   Utterly, unmistakably, ridiculously, terrifyingly terrible.
   I can't believe that this kind of displays are still being produced in the modern world. Resolution itself is terrible (1366 x 768), but viewing angles ... let's get this right: There are NO viewing angles. None. No angles. Viewing Nangles.



5. Crap. Now that I've mentioned "quiet" as the good thing in the previous chapter, the laptop started to make some strange noise of Boeing turning on and off its engines. Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.



6. No dedicated keys for anything. I miss volume control buttons from ThinkPad.



7. No alternative mouse control except touchpad... and actual mouse. I miss the little red clitoris thing from ThinkPad.



8. Shit sound. But then again, which laptop has a good sound.



9. No optical drive.

Samsung ATIV Book 4 NP470R5E The FINAL CONCLUSION

Should you buy this thing? No. 

Yes?

Well, what you should buy is some nice piece of land, then grow some food, and learn to be self-sufficient. But than again, you need Internet to learn these things. And then again again, you need a computer of some kind to access the internet. So find some, but with less horrible display at least.

Or buy this one.

Do I care?
Yes.
No.

Maybe.

There.