The silver black chassis isn't a million miles from the Acer school of design - it's just a little more understated and a touch more rigid. It's also 200g lighter than the Acer. The main difference between the two is that Acer sports a 15.4-inch widescreen to Samsung's 15-inch 4:3 screen. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but the Acer's 1280 x 800 resolution gives a noticeable benefit in desktop real estate compared to Samsung's limiting 1024 x 768. Otherwise, performance was similar - colours and viewing angles weren't brilliant but watching movies was enjoyable and there was little lag.

Other ergonomic inclusions were good. The keyboard is excellent - crisp and very easy to type on and the trackpad is sensitive, fast and accurate. The speakers lie somewhere between Acer's and Toshiba's - they're quite loud and punchy but lack bass.

Despite the fast sounding GeForce Go 7400 graphics, this is no gaming machines as 10fps in both Half-Life 2 and Far Cry testify to. You'll have to seriously reduce quality settings to play the latest releases. But while it wasn't the fastest notebook the 1.67GHz Pentium M T1300 processor and benchmark score of 0.89 isn't slow - just eleven percent slower than our reference PC. Still, in this closely-rated company the speed hit inflicted by 512MB of RAM was enough to drop marks.

But it more than held its own in features. 802.11a/b/g WiFi and BlueTooth 2 are supported and the TEAC DVD writer, which supports DVD-RAM and dual-layer burning, was one of the best on show. The 80GB hard disk is generous, though almost a quarter is unavailable due to recovery partitioning. That said, the backup process is still a nifty feature.

Wired connectivity options are modest. There are three USB 2 ports and a memory card reader (MS and SD/MMC) but no DVI port and the Ethernet is limited to 10/100 speeds. However, an ExpressCard slot does accompany the Type II PC Card.

But it stretched ahead in battery life - managing to run our gruelling multiple application test for two hours 18 minutes. In the light-use test it managed four hours - the longest this month.

There's also a very desirable one-year International onsite warranty to cover potential problems. But the best thing about it is the price. At $2367 only Altech's machine is cheaper. If you want a bit more portability and don't mind being limited by a 1024 x 768 screen resolution, then many would do well to save almost $200 and buy this instead of the Acer.