Samsung SN6300CT

The sub-A4 portable is a perennially attractive object. This is especially true if you've ever owned one of the slabs many notebook manufacturers seem to think is an appropriate size and weight for easy transportation. Unfortunately, if you have to do any serious work on a small notebook, you might come to loathe it just as much as the big boys but for different reasons. Too small can be as bad as too big if usability or comfort is seriously compromised.

Luckily, Samsung seems to have kept this in mind when designing the SN6000 series, and steered a middle path between portability and usability. In fact, although the machines do have smaller footprints than conventional notebooks they aren't that much smaller - the major weight savings have been achieved by offloading the floppy and CD-ROM drives.

The case is 29mm thick, about 9mm of which is the lid. This is thin enough to be fragile, but the body of the case is commendably rigid. The lid surface is made from a lightweight alloy rather than plastic, so it affords excellent protection to the screen beneath. Build quality is even more important for sub-A4 machines than for normal portables, but the Samsung offers no concern in this department.

The machine on its own weighs 2kg. That's not ultra-light, but it's considerably lighter than a typical A4 notebook. The drives and the power supply add a further kilo to the total weight.

Sub-A4 machines invariably have external drives, but the Samsung is unusual in that only one drive can be plugged in at a time. This shouldn't make much difference in use, as a hot-swap utility (Windows 98 only) is provided, allowing you to change drives on the fly. With sub-A4s, manufacturers also tend to charge the CD-ROM drive as an optional extra, and I regret to say that that's the case here. Samsung is presently charging £80 for the 24-speed CD-ROM drive.

The notebook itself is equipped with a nine-pin serial port, a PS/2 mouse/keyboard port, a USB port and a 4Mbits/sec infrared serial interface. It's also supplied with a port replicator as standard. This is welcome news if you have a home office setup with all the usual peripherals and want to use the Samsung as your home-working machine. Mobile communications and hooking up to a LAN are catered for by the normal stacked pair of PC Card slots, both with Card Bus and Zoomed video support.

Like most manufacturers today, Samsung has been happy to leave power management to the Power Management Properties dialog in the Control Panel rather than opting for a third-party applet to do the same job. The lithium ion battery lasts for about two to two and a half hours under normal usage conditions with moderate power management enabled.

As the width of the case hasn't been dramatically reduced there's room for a keyboard that is big enough to use without much difficulty. The alphanumeric keys are a reasonable size and the pad isn't too cramped. The spacebar is a sensible length and the Shift, Enter and Backspace keys are all of a normal size. There is some bounce in the keyboard baseplate and the action is quite lightly sprung, but on the whole I found the Samsung easier to use than many other sub-A4 portables I've tested.

The machine is fitted with a 12.1in SVGA resolution TFT screen that is comfortably readable and sufficiently bright. The graphics subsystem is powered by a 4Mb AGP bus ATi 3D Rage Pro LT - a chip that's becoming increasingly popular with notebook manufacturers that would have us believe that the small amount of 3D acceleration it offers adds something of the desktop to your portable's specifications. It doesn't really, but it's good at running Windows in 2D, which is what most people are likely to want from this machine.