Samsung P560-54P 15.4-inch Thin and Light Laptop PC

May 21 2009 - Samsung's P560-54P is designed to be an affordable 15.4-inch thin and light laptop PC. While it certainly has a minimalistic design akin to a business class laptop, it has tough competition from the likes of Lenovo. While the screen is very bright and colorful thanks to the LED backlighting, the keyboard just doesn't cut it for a machine of this nature. The battery life is also well below Samsung's six hour rating with it generate roughly four hours on the tighest power settings.

May 21 2009 - Samsung's P560-54P is a reasonably thin and light 15.4-inch business class laptop. Its very subdued design is something that many business people are looking for compared to the flash of many consumer class laptops. The rubber-like exterior does give it the feel of a fairly sturdy laptop. The problem is that this design also leaves the keyboard to be a second class feature. There is excess space around the keyboard that Samsung could have used to enlarge it. The keyboard also doesn't have the same sturdy feel like those from Lenovo, a key competitor.

Performance is mixed with the P560-54P. The Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 is slightly slower than the P8600 found in many laptops in the $1100 price range. They make up for this by including 3GB of the newer PC3-8500 DDR3 memory that helps improve its memory performance over those using the older DDR2 format. It would have been nice to see Samsung equip the system with 4GB of memory rather than 3GB though.

One bright spot, literally, for the Samsung P560-54P is the 15.4-inch LED backlit display. Thanks to the backlightning, this screen is one of the brightest available in the 15-inch laptop category and also provides some stunning levels of color accuracy. The display is driven by the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GS graphics processor that is a bit behind the more prevalent GT version. Still, the system should not have any problem with HD video decoding or handling 3D graphics up to the panels 1280x800 resolution.

The biggest problem with the P560-54P though is the battery life. Samsung claims a battery life of six hours. In real world usage, it is well below half of this on standard power settings and only up to four hours if the system is put into the most stringent power profiles. They really need to give their system a much more reasonable rated running time.