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No doubt all the Apple fan boys out there will accuse Samsung of copying the MacBook keyboard design, but they’d be on shaky ground since Apple stole the design from the Sony VAIO X505VP ultra-portable notebook that launched back in 2004. Regardless of who came up with the idea of a keyboard with separated keys, the result is that this one, like most of the others I’ve used, works very well indeed. You’ve probably noticed from the pictures that the keyboard on the sample that Samsung gave me is Korean, which isn’t surprising when you consider that this is an engineering prototype, rather than a UK retail product. As such though, you’ll find a few unusual looking keys and characters floating about, but none of that changed the fact that this is a very good keyboard. The keys are incredibly responsive, and even though the travel is shallow, the break is very solid, allowing an experienced typist to achieve a very decent rate. My only complaint is the tiny Enter key, but I’m sure that this will morph into a large Return key for the UK model. It’s also good to see the Ctrl key in the bottom left corner where it should be.

Below the Spacebar is a large touchpad with a widescreen aspect ratio to match the screen. The touchpad has a very tactile feel to it and also makes for very accurate pointing – even a die hard TrackPoint fan like me can appreciate that this is a very good example. Of course the right and bottom edges of the touchpad can be used for scrolling vertically and horizontally through web pages and documents. The two, large buttons below the touchpad blend seamlessly with the glossy black wrist rest and have a reassuring click when pressed.


To the right of the touchpad is a fingerprint reader, so if you’re in the habit of forgetting passwords you can secure the X460 with the power of your digit. Of course it wouldn’t be hard to lift a sample print from the glossy surface of the notebook itself, so you might want to use a password as well! On the left hand side of the wrist rest is an array of indicator lights including Num Lock, Caps Lock, Scroll Lock, HDD activity, wireless activation, charging and power.


Unlike the X360 which utilises an ultra-low-voltage CPU, the X460 uses a full fat Core 2 chip (although a 25W part as opposed to the standard 35W models) – a P8400 running at 2.26GHz, with 3MB of cache to be precise. Being that the X460 is based on the Centrino 2 platform, the front side bus is running at 1066MHz, as is the 3GB of DDR3 system memory. Samsung has gone with 3GB instead of 4GB, since the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Business that’s installed can only address 3.2GB, so there’s no point paying for extra memory that’s of no benefit to the user. Of course, using one 2GB and one 1GB SODIMM means that you’re not getting dual channel performance, but that’s unlikely to cause any problems for the vast majority of users.

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