Review Of The Samsung Q320 Laptop
Laptops — on September 9, 2009 at 2:46 am | Comment NowSum n substance:
Thumbs up: good processing power, excellent graphics performance, conventional but classy design, well spaced keyboard.
Thumbs down: low battery life, slow hard drive, media player features are also pretty much average.
Inside the trunk:
- CPU Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz
- RAM Included 4GB RAM Upgradable4GB
- Hard Drive Size 320GB
- Hard Drive Speed 5,400rpm
- Hard Drive Type SATA
- Graphics Card Nvidia GeForce G105M
- Video Memory 256MB Wi-Fi802.11a/b/g/n
THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: Expect Samsung to come up with something new compromising on a few of the other features atleast that’s what we ve noticed in most of the cases. And in this case it’s the endurance of the laptop which has been compromised on. Anyways, lets move on to the review and see what exactly this has in store for us…
Razzle-Dazzle: Looks like Sammy has decided to keep it to the minimal as far as the looks department is concerned. Its got a rather conventional glossy black lid with a chrome hinge and blue and orange status lights around the corner. The interior has tastefully been given a matte finish to avoid attracting fingerprints and grime on it.
Samsung does prefer to call it thin and lightweight but with 4.8 pounds and 1.4 inches thick I definitely beg to differ. I have definitely seen many more portable laptops which even have a thinner frame.
Its got the traditional 87-key non island keyboard in which the keys are properly spaced out offering a good speed of atleast 80 words per minute. The only complain I have with this one is that at times the left wrist rest used to get heated up which was kind of a hindrance to the typing speeds. The touchpad is reasonably spacious and also offers very less friction. Even the double rocker button provided some tactile clicks. Anyways I always the double rocker buttons compared to the single rocker ones.
It exhibits a 13.4 inch screen along with 1366 x 768-pixel resolution. The screen is pretty much bright and also displays good colour contrasts. On the right side it has a slot for a DVD player along with a 2.1 USB port. The left side houses an ExpressCard/34 slot, an eSATA/USB 2.0 combo port, another regular USB 2.0, Ethernet, HDMI, VGA,headphone and mic ports, and a Kensington lock bay. Its got a 3-in-1 memory card reader in the front.
Inside dope:
Well, I found the speaker quality the most unimpressive among all the other stuff it has been packed with. The sound was barely audible, tinny and even high pitched at times. Also the video quality was not that great not only during video streaming but also while playing the video through video streaming. The images from the 1.3 megapixel webcam were not impressive enough as well. The images displayed a lot of flicker along with some noise at the edges. Surely this one isn’t your best option if you’re looking forward for some great entertainment.
Coming back to what we talked about earlier, the temperature, according to our lab tests this exhibited a temperature of 94 degrees Fahrenheit between the G and H keys, and around 97 degrees on the left wrist rest whereas nothing more than 95 degrees is actually acceptable so I hope Samsung looks into this matter and does something about it.
Putting the Q320 through the PCmark vantage test which assesses the overall performance of the system, this one scored a decent 3,799 as compared to the average for such notebooks which is 3,048. Also it scored way ahead of the category average in the 3DMark06 test which assesses the performance of the graphics, all thanks to the Nvidia GeForce G105M graphics chip it comes packed with.
However the Hitachi 5,400-rpm hard drive didn’t prove to as impressive as the graphics card and the CPU. It recorded a low transfer rate of 14.9 MBps in the file transfer test which is very low as compared to the category average of 19.6 MBps. It took almost 60 secs to boot the Vista which is decent enough for its category.
Coming to the battery life, if you are going to be on the move with this one as your saviour then you better be carrying the charger along with you. The battery life that this one displays is astoundingly less and it surely could have done much better if provided with a better battery life. However this one has a unique feature called the capacity meter which lights up whenever the button on it is pressed and lets you know how much charge is left in the system. This one is pretty much power efficient and hardly takes around 2 hours 6 minutes to fully recharge consuming around 50.4 watts during that period.
Nitty- gritty: With a low battery life and a heavy frame this one isn’t exactly the portable notebook that you’d be looking for. But the price along with the other features that it has to offer make it a pretty much compelling choice. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking out for a 13-incher with good graphics performance and liberal processing power at a rate which is not heavy on the pocket.
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