The Samsung Q430 is the latest in Sammy’s super portable, low price laptop line, and with decent quality, good designs and loads of features, on paper at least there’s a lot to like. How does the latest Samsung Q series fare in our rigorous testing? Read on to find out in our full Samsung Q430 review.
Read the rest of our Samsung Q430 review
Samsung Q430 review: Portable power
Samsung Q430 review: Battery and build
Samsung Q430 review: Speed and media skills
The previous generation Samsung Q-series featured everything we wanted from a budget laptop, with style, quality and impressive performance all in evidence. The latest Samsung Q430 has a lot to live up to, then, and it starts by offering a completely new design.
The glossy fingerprint magnet of older Samsung Q-series laptops has been replaced by an attractive faux brushed aluminium look, with a finish that’s similar to the plastics found on recent Toshiba laptops. It’s attractive, contemporary and hides fingerprints a lot better than a glossy black finish.
The 14-inch display on the Samsung Q430 is a size that’s becoming increasingly popular as manufacturers switch all their laptop lines to 16:9 aspect ratios, and although it’s not as portable as a 13.3-inch panel, it’s still light and compact enough to carry on a daily basis.
As with Samsung’s other laptops, the Samsung Q430 features a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution, which offers enough space to display a couple of windows side by side. It’s also sharp on a screen of this size, although icons and text may appear a little too large on the bigger Samsung Q-series models.
Samsung offers keyboards that are among the best in the laptop industry, so providing a completely new design for the Samsung Q430 seems like a brave step. It pays off, however, with the isolated style looking great, and the extra space between keys making it easy to type without mistakes.
There’s also a lot of travel from each of the keys on the Samsung Q430, letting you press down quite a bit before the key hits the buffer, resulting in an extremely comfortably typing experience. With quick responses, it’s also more than good enough when it comes to touch typing.
Power on the Samsung Q430 comes from an Intel Core i3 chip. This may sit at the bottom of Intel’s new Core processor lineup, but with a 2.27GHz clock speed, and backed by 3GB of memory, it’s more than fast enough to run the Windows 7 OS smoothly and without issues.
Graphics on the Samsung Q430 are handled by an Nvidia GeForce GT 330M graphics chip. A powerful option for such a compact machine, it offers enough performance to smoothly play back high-definition videos, and you’ll even be able to play the odd recent first person shooter too.
Features include a 320GB hard drive, and cutting-edge Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity – offering faster connection speeds between the Samsung Q430 and other digital devices. 802.11n Wi-Fi is also provided, but there’s no sign of integrated 3G, which would have been the icing on the cake.
The latest Samsung Q430 had a lot to live up to, with its predecessors setting the bar when it comes to affordable portable computing. Thankfully, it more than lives up to expectations, delivering a stylish, powerful, portable and lightweight package at a price that’s still competitive. If the Samsung Q430 falls within your budget, it’s well worth a look.
