Samsung 305V5A-A04 review

Expansion is covered by the bare minimum for a laptop at this price. You get VGA and HDMI video outputs, two 3.5mm audio ports, a LAN port and three USB2 ports. We would, however, have liked at least one USB3 port to speed up file transfers to the 750GB hard disk.

We had a couple of other small niggles as well. Although it supports both two-fingered gestures and edge scrolling, the touchpad wasn’t able to scroll horizontally. Also, Samsung’s keyboard shortcut to toggle Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on or off doesn’t actually do so; instead, it displays a control panel in which you then have to click a switch, which is a pointless and frustrating extra step.

We were intrigued by the 305V5A-A04’s unique design and were interested to see how AMD’s A6 chip would fare, but both are sadly overshadowed by the awful, blotchy screen. The Dell Inspiron 17R has a much better 17in screen and a faster graphics card, making it far better value for money; alternately the Asus K53SC is a better 15in laptop.