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
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.
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