Review Samsung’s R780 has clearly been designed to get noticed. The glossy, deep-red chassis and slightly nauseating swirly line motif won’t appeal to those who like their laptops to be subtle, but it does make it stand out from the crowd. Personally speaking, I quite like it. That said, I also quite liked the design of Acer’s Ethos, and it appears there were a few of you who thought I had a screw loose for saying that.

Hard and fast: Samsung’s R780

It’s also pretty darn sturdy. In an absent-minded moment I managed to whack it hard into a doorway. After nervously looking to see what damage I’d inflicted, I was relieved to discover it had emerged completely unscathed. I opted not to repeat the test, though.

The keyboard follows the chiclet/scrabble tile design – Samsung has opted to call it an island keyboard. The keys have a decent amount of resistance and travel, making typing a pleasant experience. As is so often the case, some flexing to the keyboard lets it down, but it’s only likely to affect those with a particularly heavy-handed approach to typing.

Numeric keypads are commonplace on larger notebooks, but they always pose a problem when it comes to the arrow keys. Most manufacturers tend to shrink the arrow keys and shift them down slightly in order to fit the numeric keypad in. The problem with this method is that the arrow keys then become slightly less comfortable to use, particularly when gaming.

Decent keyboard and touchpad

With the R780, Samsung has instead opted to keep the arrow keys the same size as the others. However, in order to do this it’s had to halve the size of the zero key on the numeric keypad, which is usually double-width. I reckon Samsung’s got the right idea here, though – I’d much rather the single-width zero key as opposed to reduced-size arrow keys.

Next page: Ridiculously bright display