Samsung X120 Review

Aside from a slightly below-par battery life, it is hard to find fault with the X120

If you are in the market for a netbook, but want something that is a little bit nippier than your average sub-£400 ‘mini-puter’ that are all the rage right now, then Samsung’s new ultra-thin and light X120 could well be just the ticket.

Samsung’s X120 will set you back around £500, so the machine sits nicely somewhere in-between Sony’s (reassuringly expensive) £1300-plus VAIO X Series and Apple’s £1000-plus MacBook Air at the very top end, and the slimmer but slower (and hence slightly cheaper) netbooks such as the ASUS Seashell, Acer’s Aspire One and Dell’s Mini 10.

 

The problem with netbooks, as Sony well knows with its ultraportable VAIO P Series, is that up to now they have been fine for dabbling around on the internet now and then, but incredibly frustrating for using as a regular work machine. As a rule they have not really been powerful enough to cope with the demands of producing ‘stuff’ – be it copy for your blog or reports and spreadsheets on Microsoft Word and Office while on your travels. After all, the ASUS Eee PC – pretty much the template for the modern netbook - was originally developed and designed as a low-cost educational machine for developing countries.


Samsung’s designers have thankfully chosen to just ignore the ‘cheap as chips’ Eee PC influence and to squeeze as much power into this tiny beast as they could, while keeping the overall cost lower than similar offerings from the likes of Sony and Apple.


It’s 25.4mm thin, combining the power-optimized performance of a 1.3GHz Intel Pentium 1400 processor with a lovely and bright 11.6-inch high definition LED screen. Watching movies you’ve downloaded or catching up with TV on the BBC iPlayer is a joy, although setting the screen brightness to the highest levels does tend to sap the battery a little. We were getting between two and three hours on average, while away from a power source. Although we were hammering the thing with Skype, Spotify, MS Word and countless other apps all up and running. More astute use of apps is sure to extend that battery life a little.


Most notably, you can hardly feel the weight of this machine, but it seems to performs as quickly and efficiently as most other laptops in the £800 to £1200 price bracket, which is the most immediate and obvious benefit of Sammy’s netbook. You soon realise that you don’t have to feel that you are lugging a computer around with you to have a reliable, fast machine on hand whenever you need to pitch-up in a coffee-house or airport lounge on your travels to get some all-important work done fast.

 

So aside from a slightly below-par battery life, it is hard to find fault with the X120 netbook. Or slimbook. Or ultraportable. Whatever you want to call it. If pressed, you could say that the form factor, while nice and slim and well-built, is a bit ‘samey’ and it certainly doesn’t turn eyes as much as its predecessor the Samsung NC310. When placed alongside a Sony VAIO X netbook, the chrome-edging looks far less sexy. But then, that’s why you pay the big bucks. And if you have £1300 and more to spunk on a netbook, then you’re not going to look twice at this.


The only other gripe would be that the multi-touch trackpad - while one of the better trackpads we’ve tried on a netbook to date – still failed to excite us as much as similar style trackpads on MacBooks and other higher-end ‘puters. It wasn’t that it was in any way broken or that it hindered the task in hand, more that it didn’t feel as quick and intuitive.


That very minor moan aside, for a genuinely portable multimedia PC that doubles up as a handy little workhorse, the Samsung X120 ultrathin notebook is hard to beat, with Windows 7 running as zippily as we’ve seen it on most far beefier desktops and laptops and a very decent quality in-built audio system for those Spotify sessions while on the move.


The fact that it packs in a very handy HDMI output port, for when you’ve pitched up back in your lounge and want to carry-on with that iPlayer catch-up session, was the final cherry on the netbook-shaped cake that is the Samsung X120.