After clinging on to my Dell Studio 15 for over 3 years, I was finally tempted into buying a new laptop by Samsung's Series 7 Chronos. I picked up an i7 model for £849 on Amazon, which seemed like a great deal for high-end specs.
The laptop looks great in all-aluminium, especially in dim lighting with the backlit keys glowing. It's not quite as stylish as Samsung's Series 9 or as thin as some ultrabooks, but it's better than any 15" Windows machine I've seen, and about on par with a Macbook Pro.
The laptop could be lighter, it's just light enough to carry around but I'd be happier if they'd trimmed off some weight by ditching the DVD drive. The US has a slightly smaller 14" version without a numpad, I'd definitely have chosen this over the 15" if it had been out in the UK.
The display has a decent resolution and very thin bezel, so appears bigger than other laptops this size. It's bright but the viewing angles aren't great, so I find myself tilting it a lot to get the right angle.
Like any worthwhile new laptop the Chronos has USB 3.0 ports, with which I get file transfers about 10 times faster than with USB 2.0. There's a HDMI too but unfortunately no VGA, maybe it's outdated but I still used my old one quite a bit. Edit - my bad, there's a converter in the box!
The speakers aren't as good as I hoped, as with my Dell they suffice for videos but it's hard to listen to music on them, with very little bass and a tinny sound. If you're using this for all your music listening without earphones, look elsewhere.
The trackpad is pretty terrible, there's no differentiation between left and right clicks so it's easy to mix up the two. I use a mouse at home so can live with this, but when carrying it about it would be good to have a better trackpad.
The laptop unsurprisingly comes installed with Windows 7, which I liked when it came out, but admittedly feels outdated now. With Windows 8 beta out soon and the option of installing Linux it's hardly a bad thing though - at least it's not OSX.
My main problem is that I've had a few crashes when playing online video, seemingly related to the graphics display driver. I never had a crash with my Dell so this is really concerning, I expect it's fixable but this is a bad sign for a new high end laptop. Edit - Fixed the crash by turning off hardware acceleration in Flash. Guess Adobe is to blame here.
(Updated Summary) I wasn't blown away by the Chronos at first but after finding solutions to the small issues I had, I'm starting to appreciate the incredible battery life (7+ hours), fast speed, great backlit keyboard and good port selection. The lack of bloatware is also a big plus over other Windows laptops. Overall it's not a perfect machine, but for a modest price I think the Chronos is one of the best Windows laptops available currently, but with CES around the corner, it's hard to see that lasting long.
