Hands-on with the Samsung X360

2008 hasn’t just been the year of the little, low-cost ultraportable , we’ve seen a few ultra-slim, ultra-pricey models too. The Apple MacBook Air kicked off the trend back in January and now with year almost at an end, along comes Samsung with the super-skinny X360 . And yes, it's very slim indeed – as you can see from our hands-on video.

No matter how slim Windows laptops get, we’ve yet to see one that looks anywhere near as lovely as the MacBook Air and the Samsung X360 is no exception. It is very slim and very light for a 13in laptop though, and still very stylish. It’s not the most power-packed of portables, but the 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9300 is an ultra-low voltage process that’s pretty frugal and Samsung reckons that it helps push the X360’s battery life up to 10 hours.

The rest of the specification is respectable enough – 3Gb of DDR3 RAM and, in the model we looked at, a 128Gb SSD. Unlike the MacBook Air, the X360 also has its fair share of ports and while there’s no room inside for an optical drive, Samsung does include a slimline external optical DVD writer. We won’t bore you with the rest of the specs here, though – see the full list after our hands-on video.

The 13.3in LED-backlit screen is very bright, but it’s not the crispest display we’ve seen, despite the glossy finish. And you may or may not like the keyboard – it’s a ‘Scrabble tile’ type that’s perfectly comfortable to use, but we know that not everyone is a fan.

The best price we can find for the Samsung X360 is £1,180 from Laptops Direct. That’s for the model with a 120Gb hard drive – the 128Gb SSD option costs £1,389. This makes the X360 an expensive option, but itconsiderably cheaper than the MacBook Air with the 128Gb SSD (£1,761) and similarly priced to the Toshiba Portege R600.