Samsung Sens X1 LTM 753

Both the Sony and Samsung use the same basic combination of components: a 1.2GHz ultra-low-voltage Pentium M processor together with Intel's 915GM motherboard and graphics chipset. Samsung includes 768MB of RAM to Sony's 1GB, but this made little difference in our new benchmarks: it scored 0.54 overall to Sony's 0.57. We found both machines were more than fast enough in general use.

It's a little surprising that Samsung includes only a 60GB hard disk in such a media-orientated system, but at least there's a DVD writer in place to archive data. We mourned the lack of an SD card slot, though, with just a Memory Stick slot in place. Other than this, the Sens X1 is well connected: there are three USB 2 ports and one for mini-FireWire, plus Bluetooth and 802.11b/g wireless LAN. We appreciated the clear labelling too: this makes it much easier to connect cables without twisting into Houdini-like positions to see exactly where the ports are.

Another nice touch is Samsung's LiveUpdate. In a similar manner to Windows Update, this can automatically download and install the latest versions of any Samsung software and drivers installed on the X1.

This, together with the innovative design, marks Samsung out as being a notebook manufacturer to watch. Although we aren't convinced by this implementation of the X1 - it needs to improve the screen and the speakers - the next version could be very special indeed.

Author: Tim Danton