The Samsung R610 is one of Samsung’s first offerings for the American market, and it makes an interesting statement. For a 16” laptop, it is relatively thin and light, measuring 1.25” at its thinnest point and weighing only 6lbs with a rather stylish design. At the same time, with a rather average Intel T5800 2.0GHz, 3GB RAM, a 250GB HDD and 512MB NVidia GeForce 9200M GS, it is lacking in features and performance that many other 16 inchers have. Read on to see if the R610 has what it takes to compete in the crowded 16-inch multimedia laptop market.
Case look and feel
The black glossy lid emblazoned with a small and centered silver Samsung logo is classy. If you can keep the fingerprints off of it, it lends an attractive air to the laptop too. A black trim surrounds the display and hides the integrated webcam almost completely. At the bottom of the display you’ll see a fairly muted Samsung logo near the even more subdued model number – Samsung has clearly gone to lengths to keep the look smooth and unmarred by too many shining logos or blinking lights. To that end, the only light above the keyboard is a small blue light on the power button, which is actually housed in one of the two speaker grills. The black edges move on to surround the keyboard but bleed into a deep garnet as they approach the far end of the wristrest, which is a nice effect. The keyboard itself is black with standard white lettering, and the touchpad is a normal looking black square bordered in silver. Along the side edges there are some dull port markings and in the front you’ll find the expected group of blue and green status lights. Overall, a sleek, but stylish effect pulled off rather well.
Size & Weight
When 16-inch laptops first started to appear with their 16:9 ratio screens, some of them were bulky models reminiscent of days yore. These days competitive models from the likes of Dell, HP, and Lenovo all weigh in the 6 lb range as the R610 does, but do it measuring as much as half an inch less. While it does seem a bit bulky when you wrap your hands around it, or if you sat it next to a MacBook or Lenovo IdeaPad Y650, Samsung was able to keep the weight down to only 6.2 lb so that it’s not too cumbersome to tote.
Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard is full sized and, much to our joy after recently reviewing the keyboard-impaired IdeaPad Y650, even boasts a full numeric keypad. It looks like some of the keys are just a tad smaller than they had to be to make this fit, but none of the usual culprits – backspace, shift, tab – are shrunken at all, so maybe it’s just in our mind’s eye. The R610 conveniently manages to sneak in a second function key above the right arrow to go along with the one on the left side of the keyboard, but it’s not perfect, as the home/end and pgup/pgdn keys share space with the number pad. While it’s only nitpicking to complain about the size and placement of any keys, and there is little to no flex anywhere, the overall feedback on the keyboard could be nicer. The touchpad is comfortable but doesn’t support multi touch functions, and the buttons, while easily pressed, are a little on the noisy side.
Display quality
With a 1366x768 resolution, the R610 is set for widescreen viewing but a far cry from the 1920x1080 found on many other 16” laptops. Resolution aside, the display quality is fine. The LCD is plenty bright, and the horizontal viewing angles are good, though the vertical viewing angles could be a little better. The screen is glossy which goes along well with the overall glossy look of the laptop, and improves the color quality as long as the brightness is high enough to counter the glare.
Connectivity
The connectivity is pretty standard fare, with an array of ports laid out in a pretty traditional fashion. The R610 gives you an HDMI port and enough USB ports, but no FireWire, Blu-ray or really anything else of much note.
The ports are pretty well distributed, with the left side carrying the greatest load with 1USB and the VGA sandwiching the exhaust along with the HDMI port, audio in/out, and an ExpressCard 54 slot.
The right side sports another USB port as well as the optical drive, but that’s it.
The ever-so-slightly tapered front has snagged the multi card reader, and the back houses the power jack along with the Ethernet/modem and 2 more stacked USB ports.
Upgrading
There isn’t a lot you can do on Samsung’s website (although we did see a configuration with 64-bit Vista and 4GB RAM, where ours has 3GB and 32-bit), but Samsung has been so kind to actually label the different screws under the laptop with denominations such as “memory,” “kbd,” and “hinge,” so DIY-ers should have an easier time than they’re used to. The battery life leaves something to be desired (we’ll get into that below), but for those who are interested the one thing Samsung does offer by way of an upgrade is a 9-cell battery – it effectively doubles the otherwise meager lifespan.
Features
This is a tricky paragraph, and it might be the shortest if we don’t get creative here. The R610 lacks any sort of goodies like a fingerprint reader, multimedia touch buttons, or even Blu-ray. It does have two programs, the Magic Doctor and Easy SpeedUp Manager, built into the function buttons, and the notification graphics that come up when you check the battery life, disable the touchpad or change the volume/brightness look nice and don’t longer on the screen too long. But they ended up with enough space to have a dedicated function button for the Euro sign, and there’s still nothing for F11.
Still, there is Wireless-N and HDMI, and of course the best feature, a thin-and-light frame on a 16” screen.
Performance
Given the very average specs on this laptop, we expected average performance for a 16” laptop. It has a decent (3GB) helping of RAM and a 512MB dedicated GPU, but we weren’t sure it would be enough to overcome the pretty outdated CPU.
The performance is pretty respectable here, representing enough power for all the daily usages of a laptop, but as you can see the low end NVIDIA graphics hold the system back.
Samsung’s R610 managed to beat the 15” Dell Studio and stay out of the cellar, but it lagged just behind most of the 16” multimedia laptops we’ve seen thanks to the slower T5800 processor.
In its best score so far, the R610 manages to squeak by the HDX16 and gain 3rd to last instead of second. At this point it’s clear that Samsung clearly opted for lower cost and lighter weight over higher performance across the board with the R610. The one nice thing we can say about the battery is that there is a handy LED meter on it to check the life without powering up the computer. Also, that you can replace it with a 9-cell which promises more like 5-6 hours, although it will add some bulk.
Real-Life Usage
On the whole the laptop was quite comfortable to use. It was light enough and, equally important, ran cool enough that we could use it comfortably on our laps. The chassis feels stable but a few parts felt a little flimsy – there is flex in the wristrests and the hinge looks dangerously hollow – but that’s part of the tradeoff for being both light and inexpensive. The laptop ran quietly in general and we really can’t complain about any noise, unless of course you’re talking about the sound that comes out of the speakers, which gets the job done but not much more than that. On the whole though, using the R610 for general tasks gave us no cause for complaint.
Conclusion
Powered by a T5800 2.0GHz CPU and packed with 3GB RAM, a 250GB HDD and a 512MB NVidia GeForce 9200M GS, the Samsung R610 is slightly underwhelming on paper. Testing, as it turns out, confirms this – it performs reasonably well, but certainly at or below average for most things when compared to other 16” notebooks. Why, then, did we actually enjoy using the R610? It runs cooly, quietly, and was impressively mobile for its form factor. For light usage, it’s not a whit slower than any other machines, and looks good enough to be proud of in the office or in the coffeeshop. And the kicker is that you can find these online for $800 and change. It doesn’t really have the guts to satisfy the heavy gamer, and if you like to encode (or even watch) HD video you’ll be left a little disappointed. But the dedicated GPU opens the door for light to moderate gaming. And if you’re looking for a computer to use for normal tasks at home or in the office, you won’t find many lighter or more attractive models at the 16” form factor – and certainly not at the $800 price point.
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