Samsung X22 review

Samsung's X series of laptops is usually aimed at the business market. With its 14.1in widescreen display and HDMI output, this laptop is as much for home as it is for work. Its plain styling and single-colour case make it look practical and tough.

Business laptops often have better keyboards than their home counterparts, and here the X22's origins show. The keyboard has been perfectly placed in the case, so there's plenty of room at the front to rest your wrists. It makes for a comfortable writing position.

The keys are all a good size, too, so typing feels as natural on this laptop as it does on a regular keyboard. They're responsive, and we found that even long documents were easy to type. However, the three keys to the right of the spacebar (Alt Gr, right-click and Ctrl) bulged up slightly from the case. It looked as though the keys had come loose, or something underneath was forcing them up. Still, they felt firm and it didn't impede our typing.

The 14.1in widescreen display has a resolution of 1,280x800. This is fine for most uses but applications used in portrait mode, such as word processors, don't fit as much information on screen as desktop monitors. There's not enough room for an application and Windows Vista's sidebar, although you can set the latter so it's not always visible.

Samsung has used a glossy coating on the display. This helps improve contrast and colour vibrancy, but it's so reflective that when using the X22 under strong lighting, or outside, you get lots of annoying reflections.

Colours were produced accurately, and the Windows desktop looked sharp. The screen was evenly lit and produced a clean white. Blacks looked slightly grey, which can be distracting when watching movies. There's a built-in webcam in the surround, so you're ready to make video calls.

The X22 has an ATI Mobility HD 2400 graphics chipset. This has 128MB of dedicated memory and doesn't need to use any system RAM. It's not very good for games, and limped through our Call of Duty 2 test. We turned off anti-aliasing and reran the test, but it didn't make much difference, and second time around the X22 managed only 11.5fps. It's no good for games, unless you have older, less demanding titles you want to play.

What the HD2400 is good for, though, is playing HD video clips. This chip has ATI's AVIVO HD video technology with hardware Unified Video Decoding (UVD), so it can decode HD movies on-chip rather than using the processor. You'll need to download HD footage, though, as there's no Blu-ray or HD DVD drive fitted for movies.

The HDMI port makes hooking the X22 up to an LCD TV incredibly easy. As Vista Home Premium is installed, all you need is a USB TV tuner to turn your laptop into a PVR for recording and watching TV.

When you have to work, the X22 has plenty of power. The 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7300 is a very quick processor. With 2GB of RAM it powered through our 2D benchmarks, showing that there's nothing it can't handle. The 160GB hard disk is a good size, and it should provide more than enough storage space for most people's needs.

The X22 is a great laptop, and terrific value considering that it's quite light at 2.18kg and has Bluetooth and a webcam. If these aren't important features to you, though, Samsung's X70 weighs slightly more, but has a larger 200GB hard disk and costs almost £100 less.

Author: David Ludlow