Samsung's latest X-series laptops are all regarding mobility as well as the X520 slots in as the utmost requirement model in the series.

It's by no way feather-light, but in view of it houses a 15.6-inch monitor with high-powered six-cell battery, Samsung's completed fine to maintain the weight down to 2.2kg. The X520 is also sensibly compact, measuring 382mm wide, with 256mm deep along with 32.4mm thick.

Flip open the top and you're greeted by a remarkable LED-backlit screen that has a shiny coating as well as controls to turn out bright, glowing images. Movie fans will also be satisfied to listen to that the 1366 x 768 native resolutions offer it a 16:9 aspect ratio, so you won't make out several black bars when watching widescreen films.

Samsung's selected to set a slim, silver rim just about the bottom component of the laptop. Whether this is vulgar or else stylish is a matter of personal view, but it certainly builds the X520 stand out. Three USB ports are situated on the right as well as located quite close together. Slide a mega USB device, for example a TV tuner, into one plus you may get it blocks off the neighboring port.

There's no ExpressCard or else PC Card slot, except the X520 does present HDMI along with VGA outputs. As much as wireless connectivity goes, both Bluetooth as well as WiFi are presented, with the latter capable to take complete benefit of some close by 802.11n routers.

Samsung's been mainly kind with the hard drive, providing a 500GB model for you to stock up all your movies, games as well as music on. There's too an SD card reader placed on the frontage edge of the chassis.

The keyboard pursues the similar design as on earlier Samsung laptops with features flat but full-size keys. A numeric keyboard is also built-in. Samsung might possibly have give the trackpad a little more room, particularly as it has multi-touch capabilities; trying to turn photos by two fingers was mainly hard with the inadequate space available. The trackpad's keys are also too tiny for our liking, building them needlessly uncomfortable to use, and have a very soft feel.

Those involved in rare performance will no doubt be directly put off by the addition of an Intel SU7300 CPU that has a clock speed of presently 1.3GHz. In spite of being fairly low-powered, this ultra-low voltage CPU is more than able of managing the demands of the pre-installed Windows 7 and, thanks to 4GB of memory backing it up, is very well for the bulk of tasks.

Obviously, try a bit of gaming and you'll be left indignantly dissatisfied at the low frame rates, but the use of built-in Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics is just as much to guilt for this as the CPU.

In addition, being an ultra-portable laptop, the X520 isn't intended to play games. What it is intended to do is offer long battery life. We ran a few tests on it and in the most challenging test (mainly maxing out the CPU) it handles to keep the lights on for three-and-a-half hours. In a faintly less-demanding test, this amplified by just over an hour. Apply all the power-saving features with dim the screen and you ought to be capable to smash the six-hour mark, which isn't at all bad.

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Samsung - X520 features - Verdict

In spite of its low-powered CPU, the X520 is completely sufficient for unchallenging users who aren't going to be doing much more than surfing the Internet, word processing as well as a bit of image-editing. And with good battery life as well as a well-mannered keyboard, the X520 has got ample going for it. On the shortcoming, it's reasonably exclusive at £649. But, with Samsung releasing laptops like there's no tomorrow, its models be likely to fall in price only a few months after they're released. And if the X520 follows this tendency, it might well be offered for around £500 after Christmas, which is more like the price we'd be eager to pay for it. As it stands, it's just a bit too exclusive in view of its fairly low-powered components.