Product Reviews

Laptops that cost less than £600 come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, but all too many of them share mediocre design and build quality. That's why the R700 is so refreshing, especially because it comes from a major manufacturer.

First impressions are worthy of a far more expensive computer, with a glossy black finish that looks fantastic straight out of the box. The only catch is that it instantly starts to collect fingerprints, so a bit of regular housework may be needed to keep it sparkling. The rest of the case is finished in a more practical matt black, with the odd glossy highlight here and there.

The R700's screen is equally glossy. At a spacious 17 inches across the diagonal, and with a resolution of 1440x900 pixels, it gives you plenty of room to work; two word processor pages will fit comfortably at the same time, for example. It's not just the size that impressed us, though. The display is bright and crisp, and performed really well when playing our DVDs, rendering even dark scenes with ease.

There's plenty of room to store video files, too, as well as all your other data. The 250GB hard disk is big for a laptop, and again reflects the kind of specification you might expect to pay more for.

The keyboard is also of a good quality. We found it comfortable to use because all the keys are full size - one benefit of choosing a bigger laptop rather than the typical 15.4 inch format. There's even a separate numeric keypad, which will make a big

ADVERTISEMENT

difference if you regularly work with figures or use software that relies on the keypad for special functions. Slightly disturbingly, the keyboard has an anti-bacterial coating to prevent the spread of germs, a feature we're starting to see on a few products but one that addresses a problem we'd never really worried about. An anti-coffee-spill coating would be more practical, we reckon.

Home and away

All these big features do inevitably have weight implications. The R700 comes in at 3kg, which definitely makes it the kind of laptop that you can easily shift from one desk to another, rather than one you'd want to cart around with you all day. But even though portability isn't a priority, battery life is very respectable. Left to run idle, with the screen brightness set to the middle, it lasted four hours and 55 minutes. It may be a desktop replacement, but if you do need to travel with it, you won't have to look out constantly for mains sockets.

Looking at a laptop as cheap as this, with a good quality screen and keyboard and stylish looks, you'd be forgiven for thinking that performance must be where the trade-off lies. Yet it's by no means slow. Nor is it the fastest machine we've seen, by a long chalk, but a 2D result of 123% is more than enough to run everyday Windows applications and play all manner of media files.

The latest 3D games may be out of reach of the R700, but the inclusion of an nVidia GeForce 8400GS graphics chipset is a welcome surprise, smoothing video playback and meaning you may just get away with a bit of gaming with older titles on lower detail settings. The HDMI output is ideal for connecting to an HDTV set if you have one.

Overall, then, the R700 is rather an impressive deal. For this money you wouldn't expect a machine with a specification this high, and the good quality chassis, screen and keyboard make it even more desirable. If you're in the market for an affordable laptop and don't need a compact model, you could do worse than snap one of these up before Samsung change their minds.