Samsung has more stylish notebook than Apple

SAMSUNG NOTEBOOKS ARE rare birds on the market. Yours truly has been using a Samsung Q30Plus notebook - with seven-hour battery and a decent display. The Q30Plus proved to be an excellent companion to all those tens of hours spend in planes flying rconomy class.

Now, the company has decided to turn up a notch or two and launch the Aura series. Aura notebooks are distinctive for not featuring those pathetic stickers that turn your computer into a walking ad - so, you can forget about Centrino & Designed for Windows XP-Supports Vista and own a clean machine.

This notebook melts AMD and Intel inside one package

Aura R20 features a 14.1-inch glossy LCD screen with the same resolution as my 12.1-inch one - 1280x800 pixels. The monitor is connected to newly introduced AMD Radeon Xpress 1250 HyperMemory chipset (codename: RS600ME), so you can finally forget about getting a performance of a road kill and enjoy some baseline 3D gaming. Explanation: Vista chess will not run in 10fps, and you will upgrade from FPM (Frames Per Minute) to FPS (Frames Per Second) if you start a 3D game like World of Warcraft.

Processor wise, you have a choice from Celeron M to Merom-based Core 2 Duo T7400, which works at 2.16 GHz. Biggest upgrade from the previous Samsung line-up is the fact that new motherboard with RS600ME chipset spots two DIMM slots, instead of having 256MB of memory soldered onto the board. This enables you to pack this computer with 2GB of DDR2-667 like the one from Corsair or OCZ and enjoy full 4GB of memory with 64-bit Vista installed.

Battery is typical Samsung 4- or an 8-cell, giving you quite autonomy from your workspace. Traditionally, Samsung always opts for longest battery life, so when you are on the road, you can enjoy watching movies for hours (i personally spend time in planes watching my collection of TV shows).

What a world we live in: AMD has the best-integrated notebook chipset for both Intel and AMD processors. In addition, Intel is not going to change that anytime soon, judging by next-gen Centrino chipset, Santa Rosa. µ

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