Samsung Series 7 all-in-one review

Samsung may have built the Series 7 for your living room and small children rather than your game room and Crysis 2 sessions, but there’s still some solid hardware inside this all-in-one. The high-end version packs a 2.70GHz Intel Core i5-2390T processor and 8GB of RAM, which is more than enough to keep this machine humming. I ran Pandora, eight different HD video tabs, a dozen or so others, and a Plants vs. Zombies game all without any issue; in daily use, I doubt you’d ever see so much as a stutter from the Series 7.

The machine is only held back from true computing greatness by a couple of things. Intel integrated graphics are all you get, which means gaming performance leaves much to be desired; at a relatively low 1024 x 768 resolution, I only got 11 frames per second in Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X, though numbers were better with DirectX 10 turned off. Left 4 Dead 2 was better, and certainly playable, but its 28fps average output at the same 1024 x 768 resolution still isn't quite at gamer-suitable levels. Plants vs. Zombies works fine, but I wouldn’t try to do much more with the Series 7. The 1TB, 7200RPM hard drive wasn’t great either, with delays in launching applications and booting the machine. It wasn’t a huge slowdown, but an SSD would have made the machine much zippier. It might have helped the fan out too, which makes noticeable noise whenever the Series 7 is working hard — though thanks to its internals that’s not too often.

I got good, but not great, audio from the internal speakers — they’re located at the bottom of the front of the Series 7, and create a pretty solid stereo effect. There’s not a lot of bass response, though, which makes gaming lose some of its oomph. The sound did get really loud, only distorting at volumes that are probably louder than you’d want it to get when you’re using it as a computer. It’s not cinema-quality sound, but it’s absolutely viable for non-discerning TV watchers.

You can touch all 23 inches of the Series 7’s display, but after some time doing so I’m not sure why you’d want to. Samsung included its Touch Launcher application, which launches a touch-friendly dashboard of sorts from the Windows 7 taskbar — it has some finger-friendly apps and access to things like Twitter and Amazon Kindle, all of which theoretically benefit from touch capabilities. It also supports multitouch gestures (only two fingers, though) like pinch-to-zoom, and responds when you hit it with your elbow, which is a nice thing if you’re touching with dirty hands. For simple activities designed for touch, it works — I played air hockey on the screen against a friend, and it worked fine as long as we only used one finger each.

The Touch Launcher is also one of the more useful bits of software on the Series 7. In addition to being a simple launcher for kid- and family-friendly calendar, maps, media, drawing, and Skype apps, it’s got a great application called Easy Settings that lets you change wireless networks, manage battery settings, and more all with only a couple of clicks. Digging through Windows’ control panel to change settings is a huge pain, and the Touch Launcher takes a page from Android’s and iOS’s book to consolidate them all in one place.

The trouble is that Windows 7 generally doesn’t handle touch well, and the Touch Launcher is only skin-deep, so you get both an unresponsive and unpolished interface and an operating system that only lets you do a few things in a touch-friendly way. Launch the browser and you’ll be stuck tapping the tiny "X" to close standard Internet Explorer windows, and good luck navigating the tiny icons in the Start menu. There are also competing actions for very similar gestures, like scrolling and highlighting text, so it’s a crazy mystery what’s going to happen every time you touch the screen. Touch on a 23-inch screen is a neat trick, and Windows 8 make it a useful tool, but until then the Series 7 offers a few moments of touch-based novelty and little else. There’s shockingly little bloatware to speak of, which I always appreciate. There are a few games preinstalled, like Plants vs. Zombies (which I never mind), Polar Golfer (which I’ve never heard of), Insaniquarium Deluxe (ditto), and a number of others. Skype also comes preinstalled, along with a Kindle app, demo versions of a few other apps and the usual cadre of Microsoft apps like Live Messenger. There’s little else, and even those apps are hidden in folders and are relatively unobtrusive. The one exception, and this is nearly always the case on Windows machines, is when you first boot the computer — you’ll be immediately barraged with more pop-ups, registration screens, and "want to update this?" menus than you can shake a stick at. Deal with those, though, and you’ll rarely be assaulted again.