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On the right of the chassis there’s a D-SUB port for hooking up an external monitor, a modem socket and a USB 2.0 port. At the front there are headphone and microphone sockets, with the headphone socket doubling up as an optical S/PDIF. There’s also a memory card reader at the front which supports MemoryStick, MemoryStick Pro, SD, MMC and xD cards, although strangely it’s only labelled MemoryStick.

The left is dominated by the DVD writer which is a super-multi drive supporting DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD+R DL, DVD-RAM, CD-R and CD-RW. Only DVD-R DL is missing from its reportoire, but with a lot of drives that’s just a firmware flash away.

Also on the left is a four-pin FireWire port, an Ethernet port and a Type II PC Card slot. The protruding battery takes up most of the rear, but there’s also a second USB 2.0 port and the power socket squeezed either side of it.

Performance wise the Q35 gave a pretty good account of itself. The SYSmark 2002 score of 265 is pretty impressive for a notebook this size – that’s almost 100 points faster than the Sony VAIO TX2XP which had a single core, ultra-low voltage Pentium M chip, and 57 points behind the Sony VAIO SZ1VP which was equipped with a 2GHz Core Duo.

The Q35 sits between Sony’s two ultra-portable machines when it comes to Mobile Mark too. If there was one area that the Sony SZ1VP wasn’t completely convincing, it was battery life, but the Q35 suffers no such issues. Running the Mobile Mark productivity test, the Q35 turned in a very impressive result of five hours 39 minutes battery life – giving it well over an hour more than the SZ1VP. Strangely though, the Q35 lagged behind the SZ1VP when it came to DVD playback, although only by six minutes.

You’re usually expected to pay big bucks for a thin and light notebook with cutting great components, but Samsung has decided to buck this trend. Amazingly, the Q35 will set you back less than £1,000 including VAT! This price of £993.90 is even more impressive when you consider that you’ll be getting the upgraded version of the Q35 if you choose to buy one, and you can expect the faster CPU to improve performance markedly.

Verdict

The Samsung Q35 ticks pretty much all the boxes when it comes to ultra-mobile computing. It’s small, light, stylish and is packed with cutting edge features to keep even heavy duty users happy. The dual core CPU, super-multi DVD writer and well above average battery life combine to make the Q35 a very tempting prospect. But when you throw the attractive price into the equation, it’s impossible not to recommend this notebook.

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