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A few weeks ago I reviewed the Samsung Q35 and really liked it. With the Q35 Samsung had managed to marry a full feature set with a slim and light chassis, making it a very desirable product. But not everyone wants a very small machine with a correspondingly small keyboard and screen. The X60 addresses those users and provides more features and usability, but in a correspondingly larger package.

Last year I looked at the Samsung X50 and although I liked it, it didn’t quite manage to differentiate itself from the plethora of widescreen 15.4in notebooks on the market. The X60 is still battling in the same space, but Samsung has made some significant improvements over the X50.

This particular X60 is pretty much fully loaded. Samsung has squeezed in an Intel Core Duo T2500 CPU running at 2GHz, and this is backed up by a generous 2GB of RAM. There’s a capacious 100GB hard disk, which should keep even the most space hungry user happy. But if you do want to free up some space on the hard drive, you can make use of the integrated dual layer DVD writer.

The X60 is finished in Samsung’s regular matt silver with black detailing – it looks good, but not what I’d describe as drop dead gorgeous. Lifting the lid reveals a 15.4in widescreen display with a high contrast glossy coating. As always I’ll mention that opinions tend to be split on these coatings, but I quite like them and find the more vivid colours and brighter image a bonus. This particular screen is a fine example and doesn’t suffer from excessive reflections in environments with multiple ambient light sources. Samsung has also done the smart thing and used a screen with a 1,680 x 1,050 resolution, making sure that you’ve got loads of desktop real estate – I’ve seen many 15.4in notebooks that have a 1,280 x 768 resolution, which represents a poor use of physical size.