Product Reviews

Samsung's new laptop may look very similar to an existing model, the Q45, but appearances can be deceptive. Its transformation into the P200 has brought with it some significant changes.

The first of these is obvious from the moment you clap eyes on the P200. Samsung has, shock horror, abandoned the glossy lid of its Aura-range of laptops, such as the Q45 and Q70.

In its stead lies an expanse of matte black plastic which actually looks very attractive in a plain, understated way. The matte finish isn't just there for aesthetic distinction, however - it's also far more resistant to picking up grubby fingerprints than its glistening stablemates.

It's a similar story with the P200's display. While it's still a 12.1in panel with a 1,280 x 800 resolution, the highly-reflective glossy finish has been supplanted by a matte one. The downside is that the matte display exhibits a bit less vibrancy and pop, but happily, it also serves to eliminate distracting reflections. Image quality is acceptable, but it's far from perfect - we noticed a faint graininess across the panel which robs images of sharpness, and greyscale transitions showed some unsightly banding too.

Little else of what made Samsung's Q45 so great has been lost in the transition to the P200, though. Physically its dimensions are identical, and its compact size and highly transportable 1.8kg frame make it as attractive a travel companion as ever. We still don't like the lack of catches to keep the lid firmly shut in a bag.

One pleasant surprise comes in the form of the surprisingly generous specification. The Samsung P200 might cost £65 more than the Q45 Red, but it also boasts a faster processor,

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twice the memory and 80GB more hard disk space. Impressively, it even has dedicated graphics courtesy of ATi's Radeon 1250 chipset.

Given a quick glance at the P200's price and its accompanying specifications, performance is somewhat better than we'd have expected. But this isn't just down to the improved specification; its largely due to the absence of Windows Vista - the P200 comes with Windows XP Professional pre-installed. Thanks to XP's less stringent demands, the Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 processor and 2GB of memory manage to earn an impressive 1.07 in our benchmarks.

The modest abilities of ATi's Radeon 1250 chipset aren't quite so impressive, but they still cope far better with Crysis' demands than the weakling Intel GMA X3100 graphics found in the Q45. With Crysis set to low detail and run at 1,024 x 768, the P200 struggled to a reasonable 16 frames per second - keep the detail and resolution settings down low and it'll make a good fist of the latest games.

Ergonomically there is little to complain about. The keyboard's responsive feeling keys and sensible layout are generally a pleasure to work with - only the decision to move the single Windows key to the right of the space bar, a fault present on the original Q45, still aggravates.

One area in which the P200 really disappoints is battery life. The battery is the same long-life 4,800mAh one as found on the Q45, but the demands of the faster processor and dedicated graphics left it empty after just 2hrs 41mins sitting idle.

Elsewhere, it takes a keen eye to spot the minor differences between the Q45 and the new P200. The Intel 802.11abg and draft-n wireless has been swapped for more basic 802.11bg Atheros hardware, and the PC card slot has become an ExpressCard/54 slot.

But, the real difficulty comes when trying to ascertain the P200's target audience. The presence of Windows XP Professional and a matte display is normally a dead-giveaway, but then that ATi graphics chipset, and the conspicuous absence of any security features, leave it trailing more specialist business models.

But perhaps the selling point of the Samsung P200 is its versatility; it's a powerful, compact, well-built budget laptop which is as at home on the meeting table as it is on the kitchen table. Were it not for the unimpressive battery life, it'd be worthy of a recommended award.