I’ve come to the sad realization that I find business laptops more appealing than consumer laptops now. But this is the life I’ve been dealt, and life is like a hot air balloon — you can move up and down, but not side to side or back in time. So it’s with great interest that I leer at the Samsung X460, a 14.1-inch notebook that just barely pops above the four-pound mark and which Laptop calls “a road warrior’s dream.”
Not this road warrior, unfortunately. Samsung had me hooked until I saw that the big LCD only pushes out 1280 x 800 pixels, which, to me, defeats the purpose of having a screen that big. I may be in my late twenties but I can still see just fine.
If I’m going to use a 1280 x 800 LCD, I might as well get something even smaller and lighter. So to Samsung and every other notebook manufacturer out there; on behalf of business people and road warriors everywhere, we want more desktop real estate. Give us more pixels, not just a bigger screen.
Screen resolution is probably not all that important to a fair number of people, though, so here’s what you get in the still-impressive Samsung X460 for $1,700:
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU at 2.26 GHz, 3GB RAM, 320GB hard drive (5400-rpm), 14.1-inch 1280 x 800 LED-backlit screen, NVIDIA GeForce 9200M GPU with 256MB of memory, VGA and HDMI out, DVD burner, 1.3-megapixel webcam, and a fingerprint reader.
Laptop also liked the keyboard (separated keys), the bright display powered by the discrete graphics chip, fast boot time, and easy accessibility to upgrade slots. Battery life hasn’t been fully tested but it’s apparently rated at six hours.