Watch out, Apple: Here comes Samsung

Lost in the hubbub over Apple's refreshed MacBook line Tuesday was Samsung and its surprise announcement: That it's jumping into the U.S. notebook business. I recently got a quick hands-on with Samsung's slim, sexy X-series, and believe me—they're definitely drool-worthy.

Samsung has been in the laptop business for about 25 years—but not in the U.S., and now the consumer tech giant is looking to rub shoulders stateside with the likes of Dell, Toshiba, Sony, and of course, Apple. Could Samsung have picked a better day to make its announcement than, say, yesterday? Well, probably, but that doesn't take anything away from its new line of U.S. notebooks, which I briefly got to poke and prod late last month.

Among Samsung's new laptops are the standard (albeit quite polished) desktops replacements and mid-range laptops, which you can take a look at right here. Personally, I was more interested in the new X-series—the "Air killers," as Samsung proudly calls them.

These slim, two-tone Vista laptops are gorgeous, glossy, and light; the 13-inch X360 (starting at $1,899) weighs in at just 2.8 pounds (a shade lighter than the three-pound Air), while the 14.1-inch X460 ($1,699 and up) comes in at four pounds. Both come with WXGA LED-backlit displays, Intel Core 2 Duo processors (1.2-1.4GHz for the 13-incher, 2-2.26GHz for the 14-inch; the Air tops out at 1.8GHz), and—for the 14-inch version, at least—Nvidia graphics (GeForce 9200M GS, to be exact). Hard drive space starts at 120GB for the X360 (a 128GB SSD version is also available), or a whopping 250GB for the X460, while on-board DDR3 1066MHz memory options start at 3GB.

Both of the X-series laptops also have plenty of ports, as opposed to the port-deprived Air. The smaller X360 boasts three USB ports, VGA- and HDMI-out, a 7-in-1 memory-card slot, and an Ethernet port; meanwhile, the new Air is still stuck with a single USB port, a Mini Display port, and an audio-out jack.

Meanwhile, Samsung also has a Netbook on tap—the Windows XP-powered NC10, a rather utilitarian-looking, 0.83-pound number with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, a 10.2-inch WSVGA screen, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive, starting at a thrifty $499.

I only got a few minutes to play with the X-series notebooks and the NC10, but I liked what I saw—indeed, I could definitely picture myself toting around an X460 in the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center come CES. Of course, the Air still has an ace up its sleeve: Mac OS X (with the option of Vista on a Boot Camp partition). I'm not quite ready to jump back into Windows, but these svelte X notebooks sure made me think about it.

Related:
Samsung notebooks site