With its 17.3-inch screen, the Samsung RV720 is a large laptop. It isn’t quite the chunkiest, with a surprisingly slim body considering the girth, but at 2.8kg it is pretty heavy.

While it can feasibly be carried around if needed, it works much better as a desktop replacement machine, especially given the mediocre battery life. For a family machine that will sit on your desk at home, this is a great option.

We loved the half-metallic, half-gloss design. The brushed aluminium palmrests are resistant to fingerprints and smudges and also reassuringly solid. We pushed and prodded the laptop as much as we dared and found no weak points.

Like most of the new laptops around, one of Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors provides excellent performance. It’s the same model as found in the Acer Aspire 5750G, but while the Acer has a mammoth 6GB of memory, this Samsung opts for a more modest 4GB.

The difference in our benchmark tests was minimal, however. Only the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E520 and Medion Akoya E6221 were significantly more powerful with their beefy Core i5 processors.

We found we could run all kinds of applications at once with no significant impact on performance. Whether you enjoy catching up with friends on social networking sites, watching the latest films in high definition (HD), or touching up your holiday snaps, this laptop can handle it.

However, the basic integrated graphics means that you’re limited when it comes to complex multimedia tasks. For instance, while you can play older games with high detail levels and get a smooth frame-rate, the latest titles will stutter and crawl. Gamers are better off with the Acer 5750G or Lenovo ThinkPad E520.

TechRadar Labs

Battery Eater ’05: 158 minutes
Cinebench: 7262
3DMark 2006: 3267

Movie lovers will rejoice, however, at the large and crisp 17.3-inch widescreen display. Photos and films look fantastic on the glossy panel, with rich colours and pleasing brightness levels.

Audio is also acceptable, although music and sound does distort occasionally on top volume. As with most laptops, you’re better off with an external pair of speakers or a set of headphones.

Excellent keyboard

If you spend large amounts of time emailing friends, you’ll need a comfortable keyboard. Thankfully, the Samsung’s board has a lot of space to work with, thanks to the wide chassis. Keys are well spaced, using the popular isolation style. This means that each key protrudes through its own individual hole in the frame, with the resulting gaps between them meaning you’re less likely to miss-hit keys. This is also one of the firmest boards in this group.

Like the Acer and Medion, a generous 640GB of storage gives you plenty of space to hold your files, software and media such as songs and photos.

VGA and HDMI ports can be used to connect external monitors and televisions, if the screen isn’t quite big enough to satisfy you, while an SD card reader is a quick and easy way of accessing your photos and other data from your mobile devices.

You also get built-in Bluetooth, which can be used to connect compatible headsets or transfer data with other devices.

If you’ve been hunting for a desktop replacement machine to entertain you and your family at home, the Samsung RV720 is well worth considering. The excellent performance and crisp, colourful 17.3-inch screen are highlights, although the lack of dedicated graphics is a shame.

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Toshiba’s Tecra range strikes a fine balance between consumer and business laptops. The Tecra R840-11E offers tons of business features and great performance in a light and slim body, but at a price that isn’t out of grasp for the average consumer.

The first of the business features is a built-in fingerprint scanner wedged between the mouse buttons. You can use this to log on to your laptop, which saves the hassle of remembering complex passwords.

An ExpressCard slot allows you to add peripherals, such as graphics cards, TV Tuner cards and extra storage, while an eSATA port can be used to back up your files to an external hard drive.

DisplayPort and VGA ports mean you can hook up an external monitor or projector. You can even connect wirelessly with compatible televisions.

Your data will be protected from theft by the aforementioned fingerprint scanner, but it’s also protected against accidental damage by the hard drive. If the drive detects an unexpected motion (for example, the laptop plummeting off a desk), it will reset itself. This lowers the risk of failure on impact.

While 320GB of storage space isn’t a lot, it should still suit most users who simply want to carry their important files around, as well as a modest collection of songs and photos.

More impressive is the fact that Toshiba has squeezed in a DVD drive. Not a bad effort, considering the slender body measures just 31mm at its thickest point and weighs a modest 2.1kg. With its compact chassis, it fits with ease into most bags.

You can find more portable business machines out there, such as the Samsung 9000 Series and Sony’s VAIO Z-Series, but they tend to cost more than the Tecra R840′s price tag.

However, while the Tecra may be slim and light, we weren’t exactly excited by the plain black design. The frame and lid have a bevelled plastic texture, which does a great job of hiding fingerprints and scuff marks, but isn’t visually appealing. Thankfully there isn’t much flex, and the lid is particularly solid.

One of Intel’s latest Sandy Bridge Core i5 2520M 2.5GHz processors is the brains behind this laptop. Combined with 4GB of memory, performance is even better than we expected. Not only can you run all of your business software, you can often run them together at the same time, with no kind of slowdown evident.

Basic integrated graphics mean you can’t run the latest games, but then you would rather be working on a spreadsheet, right? We still found some down-time to watch a high-definition (HD) movie, which played perfectly, and you can even edit photos from your collection and movies.

TechRadar Labs

Battery Eater ’05: 239 minutes
Cinebench: 10,650
3DMark 2006: 3741

Of course, with its matt TFT finish, the 14-inch screen was not designed for enjoying films. Images are crisp, but the best part of this display is the lack of reflections when used outside or in bright offices. If you’re constantly on the move and need a machine for staying productive, then consider this laptop.

Portability is further improved by the excellent battery life. We watched movies for four hours before the Tecra died, while less power-sapping activities such as browsing the web stretches battery life out to five or six hours.

Sleep-and-charge technology means you can connect your portable devices via USB, such as smartphones and MP3 players, and charge them even when the laptop is hibernating.

Usability is another important consideration and while the keyboard looks and feels rather plasticky, it’s well-sized with covered gaps between the keys. The keys have a shallow travel when you hit them, which we weren’t huge fans of, but it didn’t stop us touch-typing at our usual pace. You also have an ‘eco mode’ shortcut key which lets you fiddle with power settings.

The touchpad is a generous size and perfectly smooth. The mouse buttons are firmly mounted, but are strangely sunken into the palmrest, which makes them awkward to push at times. Toshiba has included a pointing stick alternative to using the touchpad, which is a tiny nubbin mounted in the middle of the keyboard. Pushing it around moves the on-screen cursor, but we personally prefer the touchpad.

Managing to cram impressive performance and a mass of excellent business features into a slim and light body, Toshiba has impressed with the Tecra R840. The design is basic and there are some slight usability issues, but if you need a portable business solution on a limited budget, you could do a lot worse.

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The Logitech Wireless Keyboard K360 is a pretty standard wireless PC keyboard, but it has a few nice features and design choices that make it worth considering if you’re on the lookout for a new keyboard.

To begin with, the K360 is pretty small – around three quarters of the size of a usual keyboard. This reduction frees up a lot of space on the desk, and makes it easier to carry around.

We’ve often found that typing for long periods on a laptop – or even worse, a netbook – can be quite uncomfortable. So having a larger keyboard to use on them, that is still small and light enough to fit into a laptop bag is a real bonus.

Smaller keyboards can often lead to more discomfort and, unlike a lot of recent Logitech keyboards, the K360 is not ergonomically designed. However, we found that when using it, the Logitech Wireless Keyboard K360 felt very comfortable – a lot of this being down to the ample spacing between the keys.

The small size also allows for an excellent battery life of around three years.

As well as six media-centric keys (back, forward, play/pause, mute, volume down and volume up) there are 12 programmable F keys for linking to much-used applications such as internet browsers and email. These can be easily programmed via Logitech’s user-friendly software.

Another nice bonus is that if you have a number of other wireless Logitech devices, such as the Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX, then you can connect them all up to a single USB dongle, freeing up your computer’s USB ports.

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The Micro Traveler 900BT is a very small wireless mouse. So small, in fact, that Genius could only fit one ‘l’ into the word ‘traveller’. OK, that might not be strictly true, but this mouse is extremely small – just 74mm long.

While that means that it is very easy to carry around with you if you don’t want to have to rely on your laptop’s trackpad, it does make using it for long periods of time quite uncomfortable. This is not a mouse for day-to-day use, but we found for brief sessions it worked well.

Because it uses Bluetooth, it meant not only was it wireless, there was no USB dongle needed – one less thing to carry about – but you’ll need to make sure your laptop or netbook has Bluetooth connectivity before you buy this.

Even with the battery in, it’s very light, although it does feel quite fragile – we’re not sure that it could withstand that many knocks and bumps.

It’s got a good amount of DPI (1200) for its laser, which makes it feel quick and responsive when in use.

We wouldn’t recommend this as a primary input device – because the size really does make using it for too long quite uncomfortable – but as a back up mouse this is a compact and convenient choice.

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These days we’re seeing a lot more slim and light ultraportable laptops. Rising up against these size zero models is the Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G.

Like the Dell XPS 15z and the Macbook Pro 17 inch, this is all about packing in huge amounts of power, and who cares if it’s on the chunky side. After all, as our mothers told us: it’s not the outside, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

As with the previous Ethos models, the Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G is an entertainment centre that’s designed to sit on your desk at home.

Crushing the scales at 4.2kg, you wouldn’t want to carry this laptop any further than the next room, to avoid popping a couple of vertebrae.

That said, we were impressed at how thin the Ethos is. Sure, 40mm can’t really be described as ‘thin’, when you consider that the Samsung 9000 series measures just a smidgen over 10mm. But considering the girth of this machine, it’s comparatively slender.

We also liked the smart design, which follows the XPS 15z’s mantra of ‘keep it simple’. The dark chassis has a brushed metal finish that spreads everywhere except the palmrests, and it looks as solid as it feels.

We didn’t find any hint of flex no matter how hard we poked and prodded, which is to be expected at this price point.

One of the most interesting new features of the Ethos 8951G is the detachable touchpad. In previous models, the touchpad converted to a media control panel at the press of a button.

This laptop has the same gimmick. One push of the corner gives you fast access to the Clear-Fi application, which is a media hub for enjoying your photos, films and music. Another press brings up the play, skip, pause and volume controls, and a third press returns the touchpad to normal.

On the previous models this was nice, but of limited use as you had to be sat in front of the Ethos to use it. However, the Ethos 8951G lets you remove the entire touchpad by flicking a switch, so you can use it from across the room to control your media.

It’s a smart idea that works well. Even when we positioned ourselves across the other side of the office, the laptop still responded perfectly to the infrared remote.

Of course, it isn’t a perfect solution. You’re limited to the basic pause/play/skip and volume controls, and if you wish to go full-screen or fiddle with other settings, you need to change back to touchpad mode and fiddle around.

While the touchpad works fairly well as a remote, it works rather less well as a touchpad. For some reason, the responsiveness is all over the place, with sensitivity levels dying as you slide your finger towards the edges.

In fact, swiping the right edge did nothing at all. We’d actually recommend using a USB mouse with this laptop, to avoid frustration.

Thankfully the keyboard is typically great for an Acer laptop. As usual, an isolation-style design has been used, with each key poking up through an individual hole cut in the Ethos 8951G’s chassis.

It’s a well laid out board and a great size for touch typing, despite the tiny left Shift key.

The arrow keys are sadly squashed beneath the right Shift key, which seems unnecessary considering the room Acer had to play with. Still, you do get a separate numeric pad, which is useful if you’re a spreadsheet junkie.

Since the Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G is a multimedia machine at heart, we were keen to test out the huge 18.4-inch screen by kicking back with a sack of Blu-rays and a vat of popcorn.

That’s right, we said Blu-rays, not crummy old DVDs. Acer has included Sony’s HD technology so you can enjoy films the way they’re meant to be seen, with ultra-crisp visuals.

Of course, you can still play DVDs on the drive, so you don’t need to part with your collection just yet.

The Ethos 8951G’s display features a sharp 1920 x 1080 WUXGA resolution, making it perfect for taking in Full HD 1080p movies and shows.

HD films really do look amazing on this machine. Contrast levels are excellent, blacks actually look black, as opposed to grey, and colours are rich and vibrant.

Viewing angles aren’t too bad either, so you can happily enjoy a movie with your family, spread out on the sofa. You don’t even have to get up thanks to the detachable touchpad/remote control.

A good chunk of space above the keyboard is dedicated to the built-in speakers. Although laptop speakers are usually as powerful as a gnat’s fart, we were expecting great things from the Ethos 8951G. Those expectations were sadly dashed on the rocky plateau of disappointment.

The sound quality is fine, but there’s a serious lack of power. Even on top volume, we were straining to hear over ambient office noise.

This is especially disappointing considering how powerful the Dell XPS 15z’s speakers were. If you want to truly enjoy a movie or some bass-heavy music, you’ll definitely want to attach some USB speakers.

Those with enormous media collections are well catered for by the 1.5TB hard drive, which provides enough space for hundreds of thousands of songs and photos, and hundreds of HD movies.

If you need even more space or simply wish to back up your collection, you can attach an external drive using the eSATA port, or slip a memory card into the multi-card reader.

You also get four USB ports, one of which is USB 3.0, in addition to VGA and HDMI connections for hooking up external monitors or televisions. Acer has even included mini-Firewire, which we rarely see on laptops these days.

Rounding off the features is the almost-obligatory fingerprint scanner, which provides a satisfactory alternative to remembering ridiculously complex passwords.

When we saw the specs list for the Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G, we certainly weren’t disappointed. Acer has stuffed in one of Intel’s latest Sandy Bridge processors, the Core i7 2630QM, which runs at 2GHz.

Backed up by a mammoth 8GB of RAM, it was obvious that the Ethos would destroy our benchmarking tests.

And destroy it did. We didn’t think the Dell XPS 15z‘s CineBench score of 11,474 would be beaten any time soon, but the Ethos 8951G topped it with a score of 12,633.

The Intel CPU’s eight cores are perfect for multi-tasking, while software loads up almost instantly. No matter what we were doing, this laptop provided a smooth, fast experience.

Since the Ethos 8951G was built for enjoying media, Acer has included a dedicated nVidia GeForce GT 555M graphics card.

Most modern games that we tried ran fine, although we had to turn down detail levels on more demanding titles. HD films ran smoothly as expected, as well as video editing software.

The dedicated graphics make full use of nVidia’s Optimus technology, powering down when you’re doing basic tasks such as bashing out an email.

In these cases the basic integrated graphics on the motherboard take over, to save power. As a result, the Ethos 8951G’s battery lasts for a full three hours when you aren’t playing games, and even longer if you turn down brightness levels and performance settings.

This was much longer than we expected considering the high specs and huge screen. Okay, so the battery life isn’t really a significant factor considering the size of this machine, but at least you won’t have to drag the charger as well as the laptop when you shift to another room.

Benchmarks

CineBench: 12633

3DMark 06: 9989

Battery Eater: 185 mins

Acer’s Ethos range are built for entertainment, and aimed squarely at those who want a smart and powerful portable for enjoying their games and media collection. We’re big fans of previous Ethos models, so gleefully put the Aspire Ethos 8951G through its paces.

We liked

Featuring one of Intel’s most powerful Intel Core i7 mobile processors and a mighty 8GB of memory, the Ethos 8951G is a better performer that ten Ron Jeremys. You’re fully future-proofed and can multi-task to your heart’s content.

You’ll have no trouble running the latest games (although some detail fiddling is required on the most demanding titles), which look fantastic on the bright and vibrant 18.4-inch screen. The Full HD 1080p resolution means both games and Blu-ray films are presented at their best.

And now you can enjoy movies from the comfort of your sofa, thanks to the detachable touchpad which doubles as a remote. It’s a cool gimmick, although not entirely perfect.

Finally, the generous 1.5TB hard drive means you won’t have to constantly remove old films and games to add new ones.

We disliked

As with previous Ethos models, this bad boy is best left at home. The 4.2kg weight will break your back if you attempt to lug it around on a regular basis, and it isn’t the easiest to slip into a bag or rucksack. We were impressed by the three-hour battery life though.

The Ethos 8951G has few flaws, but we were disappointed by the rubbish touchpad. It works fairly well as a remote control, but not so well as a device for moving the mouse cursor around. We’d have also preferred more powerful built-in speakers.

Verdict

As a home entertainment machine, the Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G does almost everything right. Attach a mouse and some decent speakers and you’re set.

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Samsung today officially announced the NF310 netbook, featuring a 10.1-inch display and Intel Atom dual-core processor.

Besides the Atom N550 at 1.5GHz and 720p screen resolution, the Samsung NF310 includes 1GB of DDR3 memory, a 250GB hard drive, battery life of “more than 9 hours”, Windows 7 Starter OS, stereo speakers, and 802.11n Wi-Fi.

The 2.87-pound netbook has an island style spill-resistant keyboard, contoured “Titan Silver” case, and Fast Start feature, which allows users to put the NF310 in an advanced state of sleep and restore a Windows session in “as little as 3 seconds”.

According to Samsung’s press release, the NF310 will be available this fall with a $399 price tag.

The Asus Eee PC 1015T 10.1-inch netbook, powered by the latest AMD Ultrathin platform, is now available for pre-order in the US.

ExcaliberPC offers the Eee PC 1015T in black, white, blue, and red color. The 2.7-pound netbook comes with the AMD V105 single-core CPU at 1.2GHz, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 integrated graphics, 1GB DDR3 memory, a 250GB hard drive with Windows 7 Starter pre-loaded, and a 6-cell battery for up to 6 hours of run time.

The 1015T has a 0.3MP web camera, stereo speakers, 802.11n Wi-Fi, three USB ports, an MMC/SD(SDHC) card reader, and a VGA connector.

Asustek’s AMD-based netbook is priced at $349 and is expected to start shipping on October 20th.

Asustek has introduced the 1080p playback-capable Asus Eee PC 1015PN netbook, featuring the latest Nvidia ION 512MB DDR3 dedicated graphics, Optimus GPU switching technology, and the Intel Atom N550 dual core processor.

The high-end Eee PC 1015PN netbook has a 10.1-inch LED-backlight display with a resolution of 1024×600 and matte finish, 1GB of DDR3 memory, a 250GB hard drive, a battery life of “up to 9.5 hours”, and Windows 7 Starter OS.

Asustek’s full HD netbook also has an HDMI output port, support for 7.1 channel surround sound, a 0.3MP web camera, a chiclet-style keyboard, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

It weighs 2.76 pounds and is available in black (1015PN-PU17-BK), blue (1015PN-PU17-BU), and red (1015PN-PU17-RD) color.

The Asus Eee PC 1015PN can be purchased now for $429.99 via Amazon and B&H.

LG has launched the X170 10.1-inch netbook, featuring optional Intel Atom dual-core processor and 720p display.

The LG X170 comes with the Atom N455 single-core or N550 dual-core chip, 1366 x 768 (720p) or 1024 x 600 screen, 1GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, the GMA 3150 integrated graphics, a 6-cell battery, and Bluetooth 3.0.

LG’s new netbook has an exterior with rounded edges and comes in pink, blue, black, or ivory color.

There’s also the new LG SmartPOP technology that allows access to your cell phone from the netbook – to dial in, to receive calls, send receive SMS, transfer files, and sync data.

It starts at around $565 in Korea and there’s no word on availability and pricing in other countries.

Jolicloud 1.0, a free cloud computing-based operating system for netbooks is now available for download.

Jolicloud is Internet and social networking-centric and is based on Linux OS, combined with an HTML user interface. It comes with pre-installed applications, such as Gmail, Skype, Twitter, Firefox, and more. The OS has access to App Center with more than 700 free apps.

It can be installed on a computer alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration, or as a standalone OS.

Downloads are available via Jolicloud.com.