The days of the dinky netbooks are numbered. Or at least that’s what Samsung wants you to think, with 11.6-inch screens cropping up on a raft of its newest machines. The Samsung X120 falls slap bang into this category. So is this just a little lappie with bigger screen real estate? Or a bulked up powerhouse? Read our Samsung X120 review now and find out.
Samsung has always been at the forefront of the netbook game, with the excellent NC10 and N140 wowing us with great keyboards and cracking build. The 11.6-inch Samsung X120 is certainly no exception either, although it’s more of a small form laptop than a netbook. That panel, with an HD Ready 1366×768 pixels, is a real peach to look at, in spite of the glossy coating adding the very occasional bit of glare to proceedings.
But it’s really on the inside that the Samsung X120 is most impressive. As well as a speedy Intel ULV 1.3GHz SU1400 chipset, which gets things ticking along at a great lick, there’s a plentiful 3GB of RAM and a huge 250GB HDD.
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Battery-wise, Sammy reckons you can pull four hours from the Samsung X120. Our tests came up just shy of that mark. It might not seem much in an age when smart-books are touting 12 hour lifetimes, but you need to take into account that this little number rocks Windows 7 Home Premium. That’s a darn sight more powerful that a Linux-based OS for web browsing only.
The only real complaint we have with the Samsung X120 is the touchpad. It feels cramped, thanks in no small part to a speaker being shoved behind the keyboard and in front of the screen. Consequently you get a cheap, low-end netbook style mouse on a far classier machine. The keyboard itself, however, is decent, if a little spongy.
If you want a micro-laptop, the Samsung X120 is well worth a long, hard look. It has the skills, even if that mouse-based debacle down the front does take the edge off.
