14 DAY TRIAL // The ongoing month has been the stage for a significant number of product launches. In particular, PC suppliers unveiled a high amount of notebooks, netbooks and desktops, each intended for a specific market segment or using a certain form factor. All in all, most of the consumer base has something new to gawk at, but some room was left for Samsung to add a little more. Since mobile PCs meant for everyday computing didn't really debut in high numbers, the company decided to use this to its advantage and brought out the R440-11, R530-11 and R540-11.
The newcomers have screen sizes of 14 inches, 15.6 inches and, again, 15.6 inches and make use of Intel Core central processing units. As far as performance goes, they aren't far apart from each other. The main elements that distinguish between the siblings, besides their prices of course, are their CPUs and graphics solutions.
The R540-11, for instance, has an Intel Core i5-450 CPU at its heart and a full 4GB of RAM to back it up. Additionally, a 500GB hard disk drive ensures that buyers won't quickly run out of space. Furthermore, even despite the presence of Intel integrated graphics, Samsung threw in the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 545v video controller to make the best of the 1366 x 768 pixel screen.
Other specifications include LAN, a 0.3 megapixel webcam, a DVD writer, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and a battery life of up to 4.5 hours.
The R530-11 utilizes a Core i3-330M CPU and boasts 4GB of memory, as well as an HDD that, like the one inside the R540-11, has 500GB storage. A GeForce 310M discrete GPU is also present, as is wireless connectivity via WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet. The rest of the feature set is the same, except for the battery life of 4 hours. Finally, the R440-11 runs on the same Core i3-330M and has 4GB of RAM, like the R530, but comes with only 320GB of storage and settles for the Intel Integrated Graphics.
The three PCs have prices of between $729 and $999 and run the Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. They should start shipping in July.