Samsung’s Budget/Performance Laptops

Though some of them have been kicking around Best Buy’s website for a few weeks, Samsung R80 series of high-end, moderate priced laptops make their formal debut this weekend when they hit Best Buy stores across the country. To celebrate, they had a meet-the-press party at the Samsung Experience product gallery in Manhattan yesterday evening.

Samsung’s first serious foray into the retail US laptop market, the three R80 series models show just how far sub-$1000 lappies have come. At $729, the 14-inch R480 model comes equipped with a Blu-ray drives that output perfect 1080p video to an LCD television during the demo, using its built in-HDMI port. All this comes courtesy of Intel’s new Core i3-330M Processor and integrated GMA 4500 MHD. Yes, integrated graphics. Finally, after broken promises in past chipsets, it looks as if Intel’s built-in pixel-crunchers can finally handle HD fluidly.

The Samsung R480 next to a flat TV

The Samsung R580 playing Casino Royale

Pitching in an extra $100 gets you the R580 model, which sports a 15-inch screen, a higher-end Intel Core i5-430M CPU, and “real” graphics courtesy of nVIDIA’s GeForce GT 310M card. Most other specs are impressively similar between the R480 and R580 models, including 4GB of RAM, a 1366 x 768-pixel screen, and a 500GB (5400rpm) hard drive. The inclusion of dedicated graphics for gaming, along with the Blu-ray drive, makes the R480 the ultimate entertainer in the line.

Its big brother, the R780 forgoes the BD player to keep its price below the magic $1000 mark (at about $930). But it does add several other high-end features, most notably a massive 17.3-inch screen with an HD-grade, 1600 by 900 pixels and the top-end nVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics card. Games played fluidly and flawlessly, at least in my punch-and-kick-fest playing Batman Arkham Asylum.

The R80 series boasts Samsung’s new “invisible” touchpad. It’s not that hard to see, but it is slickly flush with the wrist rest. The touchpad has a nice textured surface that allows a finger to slip over it smoothly, and it boasts primitive multitouch. You can swipe two fingers to scroll left or right or up and down, and you can spread and pinch to enlarge or shrink a photo or Web page. But the pinching movement is extremely choppy and clumsy – nothing like on an iPhone screen or MacBook touchpad. You can also twist two fingers to rotate a photo, but this is also a choppy affair. Overall, the touchpad is more an aesthetic advance than a technological or usably improvement.

But minor grips aside, the hot-looking, hot performing R80 series offers some powerful computing and all-around entertainment muscle at a fair price.

This post was filed from NYC by Sean Captain.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers, Top Stories
Tags: Hands-On