Samsung R20: The New Black

Sometimes brown is the new black. Or sometimes it’s pastels. But never, ever, does the old black go out of fashion. It always comes back. Enter the Samsung R20. So sleek and sheer black is this laptop when closed, you might mistake it for your marble coffee table. If you don’t have a marble coffee table, then you might think that a secret admirer dropped off a new marble coffee table as an impromptu Easter gift.

On the inside,we get to the simpler truth of the Samsung R20-that it’s a new budget laptop on the market that tries hard to give you far more bang for your buck, or push for the pound than it should. Besides that exquisite lid, the Vista-based R20 delivers a T2250 Core Duo processor with 2MB of its very own cache, along with 1GB of RAM to make sure that this thing has no trouble living up to its potential.

Sure, that isn’t the newest Intel on the block (the Core 2 Duos are), but still, for this price, you cannot complain for having a processor that works almost as good as the latest versions. And if you don’t agree, then measure the size of your photo and MP3 collections, and consider whether the 160GB of hard drive space that the R20 would provide could come in handy.

But the buck does stop somewhere-in the case of this article, here. The 14.1-inch display will do nothing to wow you, and don’t expect fancier integration technology such as BlueTooth available in high end laptops. You only get two USB ports, and the Ethernet capability is limited to only 100Mbps speeds, a little short of the current Gigabit standard. But then again, you get an Express card slot, a VGA output and a modem socket if you still use one of those.

All from a laptop that comes in at about 600 pounds, or just shy of $1,200. Still, if you ever get disappointed in the R20, you could just close the lid, sit back, and admire your new marble coffee table. Expect this Samsung notebook to be a big seller in the UK.

Read – Indepth review of the Samsung R20

Related articles:

Samsung X60 With Core Duo Processor

Mimo Laptop From Samsung

Samsung Notebooks With DMB

Samsung M70 With 19 inch Widescreen

Samsung’s 32 GB Flash Memory Cards

By Matthew Brodsky – Laptopical

Tuesday, April 03, 2007