Samsung P580 review

The 320GB hard disk comes complete with an anti-shock sensor to park the head if you drop it. And the whole chassis feels durable enough to last, with only a slight amount of give around the touchpad giving us any concern about throwing it into a bag with the power supply. The lid gives plenty of protection to the 15.6in screen, with barely a ripple as we applied some hefty pressure to the back.

It's a matte display with a 1,366 x 768 resolution, and the LED backlight is even, with decent viewing angles. As with many matte screens, colours look muted next to a glossy alternative, but they certainly aren't inaccurate, and it will give you few problems in all but serious design work.

For carrying out that work, the keyboard has a little bounce to it, but it has a nice soft action to its well-laid-out keys. There are no issues with miniaturised Shift or Enter keys, and the numeric pad to the right is a useful business addition. The touchpad is fine and the buttons responsive, but they're a little too flush with the surround for us to give our full approval.

It's a solid business laptop then, and the corporate feel is rounded off with a TPM chip for added hardware security, plus a port on the base to connect to one of Samsung's docking stations. You also get a relatively small bundle of Samsung's business utilities to go with Windows 7 Professional 32-bit, such as the standard Recovery Solution and a 30-day trial for the Phoenix FailSafe service, which can track and lock a stolen laptop, as well as remotely erase data from it. It isn't a software selection to match Lenovo's ThinkVantage suite, but it's a start for smaller businesses.

Unfortunately, despite the LED screen and the fairly middling performance, the battery won't keep things going all day. We recorded just over three-and-a-half hours in our light-use test, and just 1hr 8mins when pushed to the limit. We've seen plenty of recent business laptops top the four- and five-hour marks with benchmark scores as high as 1.9, so we expected a little better from the Core-i3-equipped P580.

But this is a £610 exc VAT laptop, and that needs to be taken into consideration against a crowd of £1,000+ rivals. The P580 does lack the business credentials of a Lenovo or a Dell, and it can't claim to last the whole day on a charge. But for the price it remains a very usable laptop, with a dash of elegance the others often lack.

Author: David Bayon