Samsung 700Z Chronos review

When it comes to dislodging the excellent-value Lenovo IdeaPad Z570 from the A-List, manufacturers have their work cut out – Lenovo’s good-looking machine is a snip at less than £600 exc VAT. Enter the stunning Samsung 700Z series: a range of 15.6in high-end laptops. Can Samsung’s handsome new range tempt us to part with £400 more than Lenovo asks for its Core i5 everyman?

It’s a very good-looking piece of kit: the dark, brushed-aluminium chassis not only feels like it will withstand all but the most serious misuse, but it’s positively gorgeous as well.

The keyboard is beautifully constructed too. There’s no flex beneath the widely spaced keys at all, and the number pad to the right of the main keys gives the 700Z some extra appeal for spreadsheet users.

It’s an absolute pleasure to type on. It’s also backlit, which lends the machine a touch more glamour while making it arguably more practical, for typing on overnight flights for example.

The trackpad has grand ideas, and will attempt to detect multitouch gestures. A double-fingered drag down scrolls down a document, and pinching your fingers either together or apart is interpreted as “pinch to zoom”, although without proper support in Windows, how well it works varies enormously from application to application. It’s horribly implemented in web browsers such as Chrome, and it’s hard to see it getting much day-to-day use.

The lack of any apparent mouse buttons looks good, but produces some irritating behaviour: if you want to click and drag something, it makes sense to click with one finger and drag with another, but on a trackpad whose entire surface is a button this is liable to annoying misinterpretation, as selecting text or dragging icons around the desktop becomes infuriatingly hit and miss.

There are other gestures: a four-fingered swipe down produces Windows’ Flip 3D task switcher, while a four-fingered swipe up performs the equivalent of Windows-D, sending you back to the desktop. Neither gesture works reliably or usefully compared to the grace of the Apple system Samsung is aping. Luckily, head to the Control Panel and you can turn most of it off.

Still, if Samsung has been over-ambitious with the trackpad, there’s a lot to like elsewhere. The screen, for instance, is a matte, 15.6in panel, and is superbly bright. The lack of a glossy finish is a distinct bonus, and although the resolution isn’t good enough to play Full HD content, 1,600 x 900 is easily good enough for most work, including multimedia tasks such as image editing.

The system’s storage has a few points of interest as well, not least the 8GB SanDisk SSD, used by the 700Z’s ExpressCache system. Diskeeper claims ExpressCache can knock 40% off a system’s boot time, and tests against a stopwatch suggest around a five-second speed boost with ExpressCache turned on.

Unfortunately ExpressCache isn’t very configurable. You can’t, for instance, install an application of your choosing there. Standard storage is supplied by a Hitachi 750GB disk – more than enough storage for most, and a spin speed of 7,200rpm to keep power users happy.

Build quality and looks aside, your money goes a long way with the 700Z. Our review unit came with a Core i7-2720M running at 2.20GHz; the closest specification you can currently buy has a Core i7-2675QM instead, running at the same core speed.

There’s 8GB of RAM and the 700Z fairly screamed through our benchmarks. Four physical cores, each with Hyper-Threading, means you’ll make light work of even high-end applications: this is a very good system for power users, with a final benchmark result of 0.78.

The 700Z’s fruity inspiration doesn’t end at the looks or trackpad: in an effort to make the best use of space, the battery is a sealed unit, and replacing it involves undoing a series of screws in the machine’s base.

Still, you shouldn’t have to get friendly with a screwdriver too soon: Samsung claims the battery will deliver at least an 80% charge for 1,500 cycles, and those with an eye for eking every last electron out of the cell can opt for it not to charge beyond 80%, in an effort to prolong its life. Allowed to charge to 100%, the 700Z ran for 5hrs 8mins in our light use test, and 1hrs 39mins in our heavy use test.

At a shade under a grand, the 700Z is well worth a look. If you’re after a decent-looking, lightweight 15-incher, the next best place to looks is the likes of Apple’s 15in MacBook Pro, for which you’ll pay nearly £600 more, and which comes with less RAM and a smaller hard disk. Aside from the over-ambitious trackpad, there’s an awful lot to like here.

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