The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
As a desktop replacement, the R580 fits the bill as a budget-level wide-screen unit. It's stylish, grunty and lightweight but has poor screen resolution and attracts fingerprints like you wouldn't believe.
It appears that there are a variety of subtle variants of this model with variations particularly on the processor and the graphics. The model reviewed is the Samsung NP-R580-JS02AU **, with an Intel Core i5 processor and an nVidia GeForce GT330M video system.
The R580 is a lightweight unit in subtle dark red livery. It weighs around 2.5kg; but this weight gives us a trade-off. In order to achieve this weight, the unit is made from a light-weight plastic and because of this, there is probably more flex in the chassis (and particularly the screen) than would be preferred.
The unit is supplied with a 15.6" screen and the 1GB GeForce GT330M as mentioned earlier. This is great for mobile game-play and also as a media centre via the included HDMI port. Unfortunately, the screen has a resolution of only 1366 x 768 pixels – rather low for a modern laptop of this size, so owners would definitely want to use an external TV in this situation.
With 4GB RAM, a 500GB hard disk and the power of 4 CPU cores in the i5 package, the machine is no slouch, in fact according to the performance measures built into Windows 7, the Processor and graphics outperform the disk access; exceeded only by the RAM read-write results.
Along with all the expected ports, the R580 has 4 USB sockets, one of which doubles service as a SATA port; in addition, another USB port provides power to charge external devices even when the computer is fully powered down.
There are a couple of downsides to this unit. When iTWire received the review unit, there were a large number of finger smudges; our limited use for testing did nothing to reduce them – we hope that we don't get added to some biometric database! The other negative is the battery life, although the 2 ½ - 3 hours is reasonably typical for machines of this type.
The R580 is available from a variety of stores for a recommended retail price of $AU1,399. Would I buy one? I'd certainly consider it.
** Note that the reduced-specification version has an Intel Core i3 and the 512MB GeForce 310M for an RRP of $1,099.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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