February 14th, 2008Review Of Samsung P40
Their popularity is rising by the month. With yet one more heavy weight contestant in the market, the competition heats up. Today it’s the Samsung P40 notebook. Let’s take a peek under its hood and see what it has to present. What we conventional were a neat little package, housing a stylish looking piece of techno-wizardry. The Samsung P40 was simple in plan and yet packed a slew of features. A silver tinny plastic casing - enclosed in it an Intel Pentium M 730 processor running at 1.73 GHz, 512 MB DDR2 Ram, a 15″ XGA TFT LCD, a 5400 rpm 60 GB HDD with 8 MB cache and a DVD writer. separately from that, a normal serial and parallel port, 4 USB ports, IEEE 1394 Firewire port, VGA/ S-video out, Gigabit LAN controller and 802.11a/b/g Wireless controller with an Infrared port.
That was fairly a taste, wasn’t it? More on that later. Firstly let’s check for its usability. The P40 is quite big in dimensions than some of the other contestant. It events 12.9 inches in width, 10.8 inches in depth, and 1.26 inches in height. But that is understandable, bearing in mind the fact that it features a 15-inch TFT screen. It weighs 5.95 lbs or 2.7 kgs. Yes, that is a bit heavy. It would have been great, had they run to stay it under 2.25 kg. Breaking the 2 kg limit is quite a deterrent for users to buy a laptop computer as it counters the basic portability factor. Yet, bearing in mind the features it provides, a little above 2 kg can be exempt.
This one brings along with it a host of connectivity options too, some of which, I have already mentioned above. It features a normal VGA out port along with an S-Video Out, a standard printer (LPT) port, a serial (COM), 4 USB ports, an Infrared Port and a Fire wire port. Too bad it fail to spot out on Bluetooth. Quite a few portable devices have incorporated Bluetooth technology and it is fast becoming a necessity. As of now, you obviously contain an option of adding a USB based Bluetooth dongle.
With that many connectivity lines, you can be rest assured that you would stay connected even when on the move. That’s what it is artificial for. With the Wi-Fi networking module along with the onboard Gigabit controller, you have a choice between wired and wire-free connectivity. Waiting at any of the WI-FI hotspots/airports, connect to the Internet and send over your presentation. Courtesy, Wi-Fi. The tiniest yet existing, internal modem also makes a look right next to the RJ45 LAN connector. So, you can still use the handy old phone line to fasten to the Internet.
Apart from official communication, an added motive to get connected would be to play online games. Well, as it has an ATI Radeon X300 chip with 64 MB of Ram included, who would like to keep his fingers away from driving that Lamborghini Diablo SV against his pals over the network. I absolutely couldn’t resist the temptation. And coupled with 915GM chipset, it delivers admirable performance though being based on a 1.7 GHz CPU with a 533 MHz FSB and 2 MB L2 Cache. A 3D Mark 2001 score of 6769 and a 3D Mark 2003 score of 1876 shows it to be a respectable entry-level gaming chip. And it is DirectX 9 acquiescent too. In games, it surely is a lot more capable than the Intel GM900 based chips (which fail to reach a 4 digit score in 3D Mark 2003), found on majority of laptops. We managed to play Half-life 2 at 800 x 600 with low to medium detail at playable FPS. It struggled with Doom3 and was barely playable at 640 x 480 with every feature set to low.
The 15″ TFT LCD was quite decent in terms of the quality of output rendered by it. It wasn’t exactly as good as the ones you get in certain high-end Toshiba notebooks but the quality was more than acceptable. The response time was attractive good and there was hardly any visible ghosting. The image excellence was crispy and clear and the colors copy was vibrant.
The keyboard comes from a common family of laptops deploying multiple function keys. That is no problem here, as they are evenly laid out, extremely responsive, soft and spaced out. They do not meddle with other keys or the track pad. The track pad is placed at a smart location, off-centre towards the left side, which is pretty good as it doesn’t get in the way when typing. This is what can be termed as Ergonomic’ placement. The track pad is simple and user friendly. It is quite responsive too and has softer left and right click buttons.
Additionally, there is a separate ‘quick’ key or shortcut key to enable or disable the track pad. That is called ‘user friendliness’. Nobody wishes to go through the entire procedure of disabling the track pad through the control panel when you can do it by just plugging in a USB mouse. And further more, the P40 features similar shortcut buttons to adjust LCD brightness, volume level, and battery indicators, sleep mode, etc. and also to enable or disable the Wireless networking module ‘on-the-fly’. Simple and fast.
It also consists of a Secure Digital cum Memory stick reader slot. So just stick in your removable memory cards and you can use them to transfer small data to and from the laptop. Field agents such as photographers can also use this to download all their images on to the laptop in a flash, pun intended. And as if transferring data wasn’t enough, there is a DVD-writer too. It is one of the few laptops which aim at providing, better functionality instead of unused features and wasted performance.
And lastly, it all boils down to whether packing in so much power results in a ‘battery vaporizer’ pattern. Nope it doesn’t. It gave a decent performance and battery life of almost 4 hours 45 minutes. Including the standard and writing this article on it. This certainly isn’t bad as the laptop is loaded with quite a lot of stuff that keeps illustration power, such as the Wireless controller. It was turned on all the time. And not mentioning the benchmarks executed on it, they demanded the maximum performance, which drains the battery significantly.
So what does this all add up to? Well considering the range of features and functionality it provides it can be term quite big. But, it still does weigh a bit on the heavier side. If that’s not a problem for you, it seems to be a good buy. It costs Rs. 84,990 and comes with a 3-year warranty. Sounds a little luxurious but then it bundles almost all under the technical sun (except for Bluetooth). So lastly, if you are looking for a feature-rich laptop with a lot of technical prowess and a good amount of oomph and the weight isn’t a problem, the Samsung P40 would be more than a elegant buy at the end of the day.
July 18th, 2008 at 12:15 am
thanks for the great information…