Samsung Q330 review

Even in this new guise the Q330 still lacks a dedicated graphics card. The integrated graphics do help battery life; in our light usage test, the Q330 lasted just shy of seven hours, but playing modern games is out of the question – the laptop struggled through our Call of Duty test at 10.9fps. Thankfully, Intel’s integrated graphics chip is much better at handling video, playing 720p content smoothly on the 13.3in display.

Both moving video and still images looked very sharp at the screen’s 1,366×768 native resolution. The screen is bright, but colours aren’t particularly accurate; some images had a slight blue tint, which required a trip to the graphics control panel to fix. There isn’t a great deal of screen tilt, but both horizontal and vertical viewing angles are good enough that several people can view the display at once – the glossy finish made it difficult to see the screen clearly under harsh office lighting, though.

Due to its last-generation processor, the Q330 may not be at the forefront of performance, but it’s still a fantastic ultra-portable. Thinner laptops are available, but very few have optical drives. We’re still a little baffled as to why Samsung insists on installing 3GB of memory and we would have preferred dedicated graphics, but for this price there are few better options.