To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
Netbooks have all but disappeared from store shelves, but one or two manufacturers have refused to give up on them just yet. Samsung’s 305U1A is one such laptop, and it uses an AMD Fusion APU to power its diminutive 11.6in chassis.
Sadly, you won’t fool anyone into thinking you’ve just bought a new Ultrabook because the 305U1A is considerably thicker, being 25mm in height. It also weighs more, although at 1.2kg it’s still incredibly portable. Unfortunately, you’ll need to keep the power adaptor nearby when you take it on the move, because it only lasted four hours in our light use test, despite it using a low-voltage AMD E-350 processor. It’s a dual-core chip running at 1.6GHz, but unlike the more powerful Llano CPUs it can’t increase its clock speed using Turbo Core. It struggled in our multimedia benchmarks, even though it has 4GB of RAM, and its overall score of 13 proves that you won’t be able to run intensive tasks without slowing the system down.
Its graphics performance was also disappointing. Despite supporting DirectX 11, the integrated HD6310 GPU isn’t equipped to play modern games at high detail settings. Our Dirt 3 test struggled along with a barely playable 12.1fps, so you’ll either have to lower your expectations in terms of resolution or stick to older titles. It’s still capable of playing high definition video, however, so you’ll be able to watch 720p content on the laptop or connect an external display for 1080p playback.
The screen itself is fairly basic, although the 1,366×768 resolution is a welcome improvement over what we typically expect from 11in displays. Colours were pretty vivid at maximum brightness, but anything lower and they started to appear washed out. There’s limited screen tilt and the viewing angles are distinctly average, although the matt finish helps diffuse light reflections.
Typing wasn’t particularly comfortable because of its very short wrist rest, and unless we held our hands above the keyboard there wasn’t an easy way to type at speed. Smaller hands might not suffer as much, but the small keys could still make you feel a little cramped. The keys themselves are fairly bouncy and responsive, so it’s a shame that we found the keyboard so awkward to use.
The touchpad was less problematic thanks to its 16:9 footprint, which matches the screen. It still felt a little on the small side, but it was responsive on the Windows desktop. The smooth plastic surface creates very little friction and it supports multi-touch gestures, but it starts to feel a little cramped when you have two or more fingers on the touchpad. The very small buttons beneath it don’t have a lot of tactile feedback, and the dead zone in its centre gives away some noticeable flex in the keyboard tray.
It has a reasonable set of connections, having three USB ports, a full-size Ethernet port, a multiformat card reader and a combined headphone and microphone jack. Unfortunately, none of the USB ports support the faster USB3 standard, so you won’t be able to enjoy the faster file transfer speeds that it provides.
Considering it costs £10 more than the Asus X53Z, a 15in laptop with significantly greater performance and battery life, it’s very difficult to recommend the 305U1A. Even if you need something portable, its poor lifespan away from the mains means you won’t be able to go far without a charger, and its performance is below average at best. The fantastic HP Pavilion DV6 is also less than £70 more, so if your budget will stretch further you can find a much better value machine elsewhere.
