Not quite as thin'n'light as billed
Samsung has cheated on the Ethernet. It's 10/100Mb/s - I'd expect Gigabit on a modern notebook. But you get 802.11n Wi-Fi and, let's be honest, that's how 99 per cent of the Q430s sold will connect to the network. It also has Bluetooth 3 - handy for future-proofing, perhaps, but no more useful than Bluetooth 2 for the moment.
The keyboard flexes a little but is fine to use
Samsung calls the Q430 a thin'n'light machine, but it's more than an inch thick - it measures between 26mm and 32mm - and weighs just over 2kg. Lighter than some similarly sized notebooks, yes, but not amazingly so. It's certainly no MacBook Air or Dell Vostro 13.
There's a little bit of flex to the calculator-style keyboard, but on the whole it's fine to use. Samsung has used the extra space to the sides of the keyboard - the result of a 14in rather than 13.3in screen - to move over the Delete, Home, Page Up, Page Down and End keys into a column of their own, and the cursor keys move over to fill in the bottom right corner.
The trackpad gets the thumbs up too but I have to take issue with the large L-shaped hatch on the base of the Q430. Yes, it gives you access to the memory slots and the hard drive but it's a bugger to get back on thanks to numerous clips that tuck under the rest of the base.
Next page: Samsung Q430 Benchmark Results
COMMENTS
Well....
I quite like the design, but then again I did have one of those music centres and I loved it.
Not sure how the battery manager reducing capacity to 80% helps? Is it just a case that, as a battery loses about 20% a year anyway, the first years loss won't be noticed because it always ran at 80% capacity? e.g. "I bought my laptop a year ago, it had 2.5 hour battery life then and it still does today!"
Sounds like smoke and mirrors to me.
Design?
What a quaint idea - that somehow design gets "better" as time goes on. Of course it's bollocks - as proved beyond doubt by the plague of those hideous piano-lacquer flat-screen TVs. "Retro" in itself is neither good nor bad, design-wise - it's just "retro"
Re; Batt. Man.
So, you're saying that such an application adds an increased chase of falling off cliffs?
They should add a consumer warning.
Sexy? Not even close!
Hell no! sometimes I feel like I am the only person left who likes technology to be plain flat black. I absolutely despise laptops with those god aweful silver or grey sections. This machine's color choice makes me nauseous.
Battery
Actually, it does make sense: these cells are all charged with a constant current source, making it difficult to tell when it's truly 'full' as opposed to 'overcharged' (this problem gets worse with cell age, as I understand it). Leaving the cells slightly depleted will extend their usable life, especially for the folk who leave the thing on mains pretty much all the time (Mrs. Ball boy: are you listening?) even a laptop has overcharge prevention - which all should have these days - because the initial state when the laptop is powered-up is to go into a charge cycle...hence the long-term overcharging effects.
As the author suggests, how useful this is depends on how long you intend to keep the laptop - personally, I'd keep a home laptop for a while & would probably still have this when brushed silver came back into fashion!
