Samsung has announced its very first desktop for the U.S. market and it just so happens it's an all in one device. The company debuted their new Series 7 Desktop on Friday and it seems the company is jumping into the desktop business with a full featured and reasonably priced design.
The new Series 7 all-in-one desktop has a 23 inch, 1080p display which supports two fingered gesture controls. The unit has an optical drive at the base and the display can swivel along a full 90 degree arc which actually seems a bit extreme. Other specs for the machine include four USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, a built in 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 3.0, built in 4 Watt speakers, and a 1 TB 7,200 RPM hard drive.
Two configuration options for the machine are being offered by Samsung. One model will have a 2.6GHz Core i3-2120T CPU and 6GB of RAM. That configuration will run $999 and Samsung told CNET it will be exclusive to Best Buy. The other configuration has a 2.7GHz Core i5-2390T processor with 8GB of memory which will be $1199 and more widely available. The only disappointing spec about these machines is that both configuration options will use Intel's integrated graphics option instead of a dedicated GPU.
Apparently there won't be an official press release from Samsung until Monday but Engadget is reporting that both models will be available on October 10th. That's just in time for the beginning of the holiday buying season. This machine is much more attractive than Sony's vastly overpriced Vaio L Series 3D edition. Toshiba announced their all-in-one desktop earlier this year but it hasn't received a great deal of praise even though it has a much more reasonable price tag than the Sony offering.
Pretty much any all-in-one desktop is going head to head with the iMac so it's almost necessary that competitors seriously undercut Apple's prices to see any sort of success in this space. Samsung's design is attractive and they are offering a nice feature set for the price. I'll be interested to see one of these in action when they come out in early October.
