Samsung Q320-JS03UK review

At 2.2kg, Samsung’s attractive Q320 is 200g heavier than our limit for ultra-portable laptops, but it’s still light enough to carry regularly.

With a battery life of four hours and 21 minutes, it can survive for long enough away from a power socket to be useful.

While it may be heavier than a standard ultra-portable, the weight has been put to good use, with Samsung fitting high-quality components. The 2GHz Pentium Dual Core T4200 processor and 4GB of RAM are a potent combination, helping the Q320 to an overall score of 51 in our 2D benchmarks. The Nvidia GeForce 105M graphics are a step up from integrated Intel graphics, although the score of 9.2fps in our Call of Duty 4 benchmarks shows that it still can’t cope with the latest games. Less demanding strategy games and older titles at low resolutions should be fine, though.

The bright 13.4in display has a resolution of 1,366×768. Viewing angles aren’t very good, though, and moving off-centre makes the screen look washed out. We also found that text wasn’t quite as sharp as on other laptops.

Despite the small size of the case, Samsung has managed to squeeze in a slot-loading DVD drive for watching movies. A minor annoyance is that there’s no eject button and you have to press Fn-Insert to remove a disc. The speakers are useful for watching a film on the move, although they distort at full volume.

They keyboard’s great. Samsung has used all the available space, and all the keys are a good size. They’re responsive and comfortable to type on, too, making the Q320 a decent computer for work as well as pleasure.

There’s a lot else to like, too. The generous 500GB hard disk provides plenty of storage space. VGA and HDMI outputs mean that this laptop is easy to connect to almost any external display, from a projector to an HD TV.

Samsung’s Q320, by virtue of its weight, isn’t quite an ultra-portable, but its small size means that it’s still a decent travelling companion. Its screen isn’t quite as good as we’d hoped, however, so this laptop just misses out on an award.