Review: Samsung Q30 ultraportable notebook

Samsung's updated version of the Q30, internally badged the Q30+, but still available on its website as the Q30 Red, adds extra processing power and the 915GM chipset to this super-slim, ultra light notebook.

It is aimed at people who don't want to carry around a heavy machine, but want enough power for office tasks and decent battery life.

To gauge its performance and portability, we've been road-testing the notebook for several months, including two international trips.

With its small battery, which lasts two hours 22 minutes for office tasks, it weighs a mere 1.15kg.

Slot in the supplied long-life battery and the notebook lasts almost five hours and adds just 200g to the weight, making the Q30 a great option for anyone that needs to carry the notebook all day and doesn't want to take a power adapter.

With its lid closed, the Q30 is only 18mm thick - thanks in part to the lack of an internal optical drive. Instead it comes with an external dual layer DVD drive, but again it is very light.

It weighs only 600g, so even if you took this, the notebook and both batteries, you'd still be carrying under 2kg.

The problem with ultra portables is their performance can be very pedestrian. With a 1.2GHz Pentium M CPU, don't expect to play the latest games, but it will cope with office tasks. By using this Ultra Low Voltage CPU though, it helps conserve battery life and means it does not need a fan.

During our long term test, we pushed it to its limits. It often had our copy of Openoffice Word, our email client, Adobe Photoshop and several Internet browsers running at the same time.

We loaded and converted Raw photo files, managed our podcasts, used it to write and load stories on the web and made video calls over Skype on the laptop.

With so much going on, it did struggle and could benefit from another 512MB of memory. But we often had an extreme amount of applications running simultaneously, and closing a few would speed up the laptop.

With only a few running, such as Word, email and Internet radio, it would work fine.

The full-size keyboard is very comfortable to type on and the 12.1in widescreen display easy on the eye. As an Intel Centrino machine it has inbuilt 802.11g wireless, plus two USB2 and a Firewire port.

It also has slots for SD, Memory Stick/Pro and Compact Flash cards. But it does not have a PC Card slot.

Both batteries and the external optical drive come as standard with the Q30, plus there's Samsung's notebook management software pre-installed.

If you need lots of processing power, this is not the laptop for you. But if you're after a back-friendly machine that's easy to use and has long battery life, the Q30 is worth consideration.