Hands-on with Samsung's 14-inch X460 laptop

It's thin, light, and oh-so-fast, and it even comes with a fashionable, two-tone color scheme. Just be prepared to pay a premium for the X460's good looks and svelte profile.

I blogged about Samsung's new line of U.S.-bound laptops—which debuted just a day after Apple unveiled its redesigned MacBooks and MacBook Pros—back in October, and Samsung was kind enough to lend me the 14-inch, 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo X460 model for a few weeks. (A 13-inch model, the X360, is also available.)

Now, a few preliminaries: I'm primarily a Mac user, although I have an older HP-Compaq XP notebook here at home ... somewhere ... as well as Vista installed under Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro. And while I'd love to have a laptop as thin and light as the three-pound Air for trade shows, I'm put off by the Air's lofty price tag and paucity of ports (just one USB port, a Mini Display port, and an audio jack—no Ethernet).

So here comes the two-tone (maroon and black) X460—four pounds, versus three for the Air, and yes, it's running Vista—but still, I've been pretty impressed so far.

First of all, there's no port problem with the X460—we're talking three USB ports (one on either side, and another in back), gigabit Ethernet, VGA, HDMI, an ExpressCard/34 slot, and microphone and headphone jacks. Also on board: a memory card reader (compatible with MS, MSPRO, SD, SDHC, MMC, MMC plus, and xD cards), plus a DVD-burning optical drive. Nice.

I was also impressed by how peppy the X460 feels, especially considering that it's running Vista; apps like Microsoft Word opened in a matter of seconds, Flash-addled Web pages opened quickly, and 720p videos on Hulu played relatively smoothly (with a few minor hiccups here and there). Of course, discrete graphics never hurt—Nvidia GeForce 9200M GS with 256MB of dedicated memory, in the case of the X460. (CNET has benchmarking numbers right here.)

Of course, size matters, and the X460 scores (with me, anyway) with its slim profile (just an inch thick at its thickest point, tapering down to about half an inch) and weight (four pounds, four ounces, according to my digital scale). Compare that to five pounds, seven ounces for my MacBook Pro (last-generation, not the new one), which starts to feel like a brick after trudging around the Las Vegas Convention Center for a few hours.

All well and good, but then there's the price tag—a cool $1,799 for the 2.26GHz model I tested (plus 3GB of DDR3 RAM and a 320GB hard drive). That's relatively cheap by Mac standards ($1,800 only gets you a 1.6GHz Air with 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive), but as CNET points out, it's still pricey compared to other 14-inch Windows notebooks (although the $1,049 Asus X83VM-X1, which CNET recommends, weighs about a pound more than the X460). Then again—if you don't mind sacrificing a little horsepower—you can find the 2.0GHz X460 for less than $1,500 online.

So yes, were I in the market for a slim-yet-robust Vista laptop, I'd give the X460 a serious look—although I'm not ready to kick Mac OS X to the curb quite yet.