Monthly Main Meeting Highlights

July Main Meeting 2010

Tonight was our Annual General Meeting.

Alan Matthews and Roger Foulds have been elected to the committee.
Alex Zaharov-Reutt was made a life member in recognition of his support and dedication to the club. By the use of his contacts as technological journalist, Alex has constantly provided the club with presenters from major computing companies such as, Samsung, Toshiba, Intel, and AMD, along with Microsoft and many other leading software companies.
Those efforts and his knowledge and advice during our regular Q & A sessions have made the main meeting nights a consistently interesting and informative place to be.

Alex checking the settings of a member’s laptop during Q & A.

After a short break, we had Samsung drop in to show us their range of laptops and netbooks.
Emmanuele Silanesu, the National Product and Marketing Manager and Anthony Ceroli, Notebook Product Marketing Manager, from the IT Division of Samsung Australia, gave us a good overview of the Samsung way of computing.

Samsung is involved in defence, shipping, construction, and, of course, electronics

Samsung Electronics which has a turnover twice as large as Nokia, LG or Sony, produce everything from fridges to phones and the scale of the company means they can make every component in the PC from batteries to hard drives.
See the great range of consumer electronics offered by Samsung at
http://www.samsung.com/au/

The first thing Anthony spoke about was Allshare - Samsung’s network system that allows file and device sharing, using either a wireless or router connection. This allows information to be streamed from the computer to the TV or the Camcorder.

Samsung has created a silent mode to quieten the fan, and a hybrid sleep mode for a fast start to the laptop. Once a Samsung laptop has booted up the first time, it will get up and running in three seconds. To achieve this, the hybrid sleep mode saves data to the hard drive and in memory so you get a fast wake up.

Another Samsung innovation is switchable graphics. The laptop senses the memory load on the graphics driver and will automatically switch between the onboard card and the dedicated graphic card.

Samsung have also developed a technology to give their laptops an extended battery life (EBL). I find nothing more annoying than having my laptop go into hibernation just before the end of the DVD. The only alternative is to recharge at lunchtime, even though the battery still has a half charge. That reduces the overall battery life.
Samsung has the answer in EBL. In the EBL mode the battery charges to 80%. This reduces the drain on the battery thus extending its life. You can choose to recharge the battery in full or use the EBL technology.

For the road warriors among us Samsung laptops can be used to recharge your mobile phone, MP3 player or any portable device through the USB port, even if the laptop is turned off. I believe only Benq have a similar feature.

Anthony then showed us two of the Samsung laptop range.
The R590 comes with the i5 Intel chip and a 15 inch screen.

It retails at $1399 and comes with the latest Samsung innovations such as EBL and USB charging.

The Q330 has the i3 Intel chip to drive the machine, a 13.3 inch screen and retails in at only $1199.
I found this a very exciting laptop. I have a netbook and a Laptop. The Laptop with the charger weights around 3.5 kilos but has a DVD driver. The netbook with a charger and a portable DVD weights around 1.5 kilos, but only has a 9 inch screen. Therefore, while it’s light it makes for a poor machine to do any real work with.
I found the design of the Q330 stunning. It has a slim design, only 26.4 mm thick but comes with a built in DVD, and all this delivered at a weight of only 1.96 kg.