Samsung's new P35 laptop is a desktop replacement model that boasts a reasonable battery life, making it well suited for use by mobile professionals such as travelling sales staff.

Shipping this month, the P35 is an update to the P30 series Samsung launched earlier this year, and has one of the longest battery lives we have seen for a laptop with a 15in screen. Our review unit, which had a 4.4 amp-hour lithium ion battery, achieved a battery life of three hours and 45 minutes in our BatteryMark 4.01 test with screen brightness set to maximum. Halving the brightness gave an extra 40 minutes of life.

Our review model was the top-of-the-range HZM model with a 1.8GHz Dothan version of Intel's Pentium M processor and 512MB of DDR memory, expandable to 1GB. It also had a 60GB hard disk and DVD Multi Recorder supporting most writable DVD and CD formats. A less expensive model, the P35 MVC 735, has a slightly slower processor and smaller hard disk, and costs £200 less. It weighs about 2.6kg.

Performance, as measured by our Business Winstone 2004 benchmark, was good. The P35's score of 21.5 is the best we have seen for a laptop using Intel's Centrino mobile platform, but not as high as we had expected, given its clock speed and the 2MB cache of its Dothan Pentium M chip compared with the 1MB of previous versions.

Intel's Dothan chip, built using a 90nm manufacturing process, is designed to need less power, thus extending battery life. The chip also incorporates Intel's "strained silicon" technology, which allows transistors to switch faster and hence speed up processing.

The P35 also features a built-in fingerprint scanner that can be used to control access to the laptop. A supplied Windows tool, TouchChip Protector Suite 4.3.1, allows the user to register their fingerprint, after which the system can be set to only boot up after a valid fingerprint scan, or a fingerprint scan and valid password.

For network connectivity the P35 has Intel's Pro/Wireless 2200BG mini-PCI adapter for connecting to 802.11b/g wireless networks; plus a 10/100 Ethernet adapter and modem port.

Other I/O connections include a three-in-one memory card reader compatible with Secure Digital (SD), MMC and Sony's Memory Stick media, although it only supports cards up to 128MB.

There are also two USB 2.0 ports, one PS/2 link, an S-Video port and a mini-FireWire connection, plus legacy serial, parallel and infrared ports. A security lock slot is also present at the rear of the system.

The P35's 15in screen is driven by an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB of DDR graphics memory. It has a native resolution of 1,400x1,050 and external monitors can be driven at 1,600x1,200 at 85Hz.

Samsung ships the P35 with Windows XP Professional as standard, although Windows 2000 Professional can be specified if required. Pre-installed software includes CyberLink's PowerDVD 5, Norton Antivirus 2003, and Sun's Java 2 Runtime Environment (J2RE) V1.4.2_03.

There was also a package of XP security updates that we could install. On separate CDs were copies of Ulead's Photo Explorer 7.0 and Video Studio 7.0 as well as Ahead's Nero Burning Rom 5.5.

We found that recovering the system required three CDs and took about an hour to accomplish. After the initial XP Professional install using a system recovery disk, we had to re-load drivers for several devices, such as the wireless LAN and the memory card reader. The final CD was used to reinstall the applications.

Price: £1,499 + VAT

Contact: Samsung 01932 455000