Samsung 600B5B review

The 600B5B was surprisingly comfortable to use for day-to-day tasks. Despite the angular chassis, we could type without the laptop’s edges cutting into our wrists thanks to the rubberised finish that also kept the entire keyboard tray cool. The keyboard itself uses standard laptop keys that are tightly grouped together, but at least full-size so we rarely made spelling errors. A choice of touchpad or touchstick is a bonus, although the buttons on both need quite a shove to register.

Unsurprisingly for a business machine, the 15.6in screen has a matt finish that’s great for diffusing light reflections, but poor at producing vibrant colours. The 1,366×768 resolution is reasonably sharp, but viewing angles are poor. There is at least a huge amount of screen tilt, so you should be able to work regardless of ambient lighting.

Like most business laptops, connectivity was excellent. Two USB3 ports, one regular USB and one USB shared with eSATA provide plenty of room for external expansion, as do the ExpressCard/34 slot and multi-format card reader. There’s also a fingerprint reader for the security-conscious and a DVD re-writer.

Its performance, connectivity and usability are all impressive, but we still can’t recommend the 600B5B to most people. It makes most sense for business users that need a dedicated graphics card optimised for business applications, but for most home users there are better, more well-rounded machines available for a similar price, such as the Acer Aspire 5755G.