Designed with an eye on practicality and with style often factoring low in the equation, corporate laptops are rarely things of beauty. Samsung's new business-oriented P580 doesn't do anything to alter this image.
This portable laptop for road warriors is as plain as plain can be, looking like it was designed by a committee to be as inconspicuous as possible for fear of offending anyone.
Fortunately, Samsung compensates by bundling a great set of specs under the hood, even whacking in a graphics card, and it's well priced.
First, let's cover that look. The one thing Samsung has gone for is to manufacture a hardy business model. The press bumph states that the P-Series " boasts a light-yet-tough rubberised soft-grip lid".
We can't argue with that. The matte black lid has a rubberised bump surface produced by tiny raised squares and feels both practical and resilient.
The P580 also has a Protect-O-Edge casing, which sounds like something dreamed up by Nick Park for Wallace and Gromit. But again, we can't fault the results. We found it very sturdy and obviously capable of withstanding a few knocks. It's also built to cope with the demands of travelling, with Samsung including one of its anti-drop hard drive sensors; this kicks in a bit too easily by default, but the sensitivity settings can be changed.
The ugly chassis is hard to ignore, though. It feels like it's made from the leftover plastic Formica flooring that bedecked dodgy cafés of yesteryear. We were almost waiting for a tomato ketchup bottle shaped like an actual tomato to fall out of Samsung's box. Practical, resilient, but ugly as sin.
Keyboard
The brilliant keyboard goes some way to making up for this. It's built with business practicalities in mind.
Samsung hasn't opted for a chiclet-style board, which seems to be the choice these days, but we found it perfect for long periods of use thanks to a solid bounce and keys that make the most of the 15.6in frame. The over-sized backspace, return and right shift keys further aid usability. It also has a separate numeric keypad at the right, making it simpler for bean counters to type in data on Excel docs or accounting packages.
The touchpad was rather more disappointing. It has a blue backlit LED that feels completely out of place, and sports a multi-touch interface. If it were the same size as an iPad screen it would work, but it's way too small to be of any practical use here.
Inputs/outputs
We were surprised at the lack of features such as biometric support or even a PC card slot; the latter means you will need to keep those USB keys handy.
However, the usual range of ports are available. The right-hand side houses a multi-format DVD drive and two USB ports, while the left has a VGA port, Ethernet, a couple of audio jacks and one more USB.
There's also an HDMI port, which allows for a quick audio/video link to an external display via a single cable. Combined with the inclusion of a discrete graphics card, this gives the P580 the ability to cope with impressive multimedia business presentations rather than having to fall back on PowerPoint.
Display
The 15.6in display has a 1,366 x 768 resolution. Many will appreciate the lack of a gloss finish, with the P580 using a matte finish LED-backlit display instead. Try as we might, we couldn't get so much as a glint of reflection, even in brightly lit conditions.
We were impressed with YouTube HD playback. Nvidia's Geforce GT 330M with 1GB of memory gave the P580 enough grunt to turn over HD content without any hiccups.
We also found the vertical and horizontal optimal viewing angle on the screen to be fairly wide.
Our only bone of contention was a slight grain produced by the matte finish that dulled the vibrancy of the colours. At least you can hook up to another display using the HDMI output.
It's a shame that the 1.5W stereo speakers don't match the visual capabilities. We weren't expecting miracles on a business laptop, but the tinny audio is disappointing considering Samsung's paid so much attention to creating a machine that's good at multimedia presentations.
Specs
The specs are nifty enough to give the P580 fluid performance when multi-tasking. It comes with Intel's Core i3-330M running at 2.13GHz and 3GB of RAM. There's a 1GB stick and a 2GB stick, but with only two DIMM slots you can't upgrade without ditching one of them.
That said, we didn't have any performance issues with a range of apps and web pages open, even when we were running HD content in the background.
The 320GB hard drive is a little light these days, but should be adequate for most business users. Those after a 64-bit operating system will be disappointed to hear that Samsung's opted for the 32-bit flavour of Windows 7 Professional. It has, however, chucked in a XP Pro Recovery CD.
The software bundle isn't much, with trial versions of McAfee, Microsoft Office and some generic Samsung apps, along with Cyberlink software to make use of the 1.3-megapixel webcam.
It can handle video Skype but slows to a Matisse blur in low-light conditions; if you're making videoconference calls, make sure there's plenty of light.
With its six-cell battery, we thought the P580 would clock in more time on our Battery Eater test. Using Samsung's optimised power plan setting we put the P580 through an intensive test to drain the batteries as quickly as possible, and it managed just over two hours at 125 minutes. After manually configuring the power options, we managed a much more reasonable 224 minutes.
Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/v3/hardware/2269248/samsung-p580-business-laptop?page=2#ixzz0z9mHjtmk
Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.
This portable laptop for road warriors is as plain as plain can be, looking like it was designed by a committee to be as inconspicuous as possible for fear of offending anyone.
Fortunately, Samsung compensates by bundling a great set of specs under the hood, even whacking in a graphics card, and it's well priced.
First, let's cover that look. The one thing Samsung has gone for is to manufacture a hardy business model. The press bumph states that the P-Series " boasts a light-yet-tough rubberised soft-grip lid".
We can't argue with that. The matte black lid has a rubberised bump surface produced by tiny raised squares and feels both practical and resilient.
The P580 also has a Protect-O-Edge casing, which sounds like something dreamed up by Nick Park for Wallace and Gromit. But again, we can't fault the results. We found it very sturdy and obviously capable of withstanding a few knocks. It's also built to cope with the demands of travelling, with Samsung including one of its anti-drop hard drive sensors; this kicks in a bit too easily by default, but the sensitivity settings can be changed.
The ugly chassis is hard to ignore, though. It feels like it's made from the leftover plastic Formica flooring that bedecked dodgy cafés of yesteryear. We were almost waiting for a tomato ketchup bottle shaped like an actual tomato to fall out of Samsung's box. Practical, resilient, but ugly as sin.
Keyboard
The brilliant keyboard goes some way to making up for this. It's built with business practicalities in mind.
Samsung hasn't opted for a chiclet-style board, which seems to be the choice these days, but we found it perfect for long periods of use thanks to a solid bounce and keys that make the most of the 15.6in frame. The over-sized backspace, return and right shift keys further aid usability. It also has a separate numeric keypad at the right, making it simpler for bean counters to type in data on Excel docs or accounting packages.
The touchpad was rather more disappointing. It has a blue backlit LED that feels completely out of place, and sports a multi-touch interface. If it were the same size as an iPad screen it would work, but it's way too small to be of any practical use here.
Inputs/outputs
We were surprised at the lack of features such as biometric support or even a PC card slot; the latter means you will need to keep those USB keys handy.
However, the usual range of ports are available. The right-hand side houses a multi-format DVD drive and two USB ports, while the left has a VGA port, Ethernet, a couple of audio jacks and one more USB.
There's also an HDMI port, which allows for a quick audio/video link to an external display via a single cable. Combined with the inclusion of a discrete graphics card, this gives the P580 the ability to cope with impressive multimedia business presentations rather than having to fall back on PowerPoint.
Display
The 15.6in display has a 1,366 x 768 resolution. Many will appreciate the lack of a gloss finish, with the P580 using a matte finish LED-backlit display instead. Try as we might, we couldn't get so much as a glint of reflection, even in brightly lit conditions.
We were impressed with YouTube HD playback. Nvidia's Geforce GT 330M with 1GB of memory gave the P580 enough grunt to turn over HD content without any hiccups.
We also found the vertical and horizontal optimal viewing angle on the screen to be fairly wide.
Our only bone of contention was a slight grain produced by the matte finish that dulled the vibrancy of the colours. At least you can hook up to another display using the HDMI output.
It's a shame that the 1.5W stereo speakers don't match the visual capabilities. We weren't expecting miracles on a business laptop, but the tinny audio is disappointing considering Samsung's paid so much attention to creating a machine that's good at multimedia presentations.
Specs
The specs are nifty enough to give the P580 fluid performance when multi-tasking. It comes with Intel's Core i3-330M running at 2.13GHz and 3GB of RAM. There's a 1GB stick and a 2GB stick, but with only two DIMM slots you can't upgrade without ditching one of them.
That said, we didn't have any performance issues with a range of apps and web pages open, even when we were running HD content in the background.
The 320GB hard drive is a little light these days, but should be adequate for most business users. Those after a 64-bit operating system will be disappointed to hear that Samsung's opted for the 32-bit flavour of Windows 7 Professional. It has, however, chucked in a XP Pro Recovery CD.
The software bundle isn't much, with trial versions of McAfee, Microsoft Office and some generic Samsung apps, along with Cyberlink software to make use of the 1.3-megapixel webcam.
It can handle video Skype but slows to a Matisse blur in low-light conditions; if you're making videoconference calls, make sure there's plenty of light.
With its six-cell battery, we thought the P580 would clock in more time on our Battery Eater test. Using Samsung's optimised power plan setting we put the P580 through an intensive test to drain the batteries as quickly as possible, and it managed just over two hours at 125 minutes. After manually configuring the power options, we managed a much more reasonable 224 minutes.
Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/v3/hardware/2269248/samsung-p580-business-laptop?page=2#ixzz0z9mHjtmk
Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.
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