Comments Samsung NC10 - 10.2in Netbook - Laptop - review

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Alexa08

8:24 AM on 17 November, 2008

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what's with the single mouse button, though?

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First off, what a pleasure to read such an excellent and complete hardware review. Even though I consider myself computer literate, I didn't know the first thing about Netbooks, and it's getting harder (and certainly very time consuming) trying to glean what's fact from what someone thinks is fact these days ;)

My wife and I bought a black and a blue NC10 yesterday from PC World (didn't particularly like the white although it does have a nice matt external finish) after reading this review and others, and the reviews are absolutely spot on. (Oh and yes I know it's cheaper online but if someone's going to pay to have a store where I can hold the goods and compare them with other netbooks, that's worth paying a slight premium for IMHO. BTW we bargained off £10 from each Netbook if you like to haggle.)

The NC10 comes working out of the box (although needs power to charge up the battery) but still requires you to go through the normal Windows update, Samsung updates and Backup. However this is pretty much all done for you by the software. The backup software partitions the hard drive in two by default (but that's confidurable) and permits you to create a restore of the whole of the C: drive on the D: drive which is handy if you don't have an external CD drive or networked CD drive you can use. BTW, well done Samsung for including the OS and necessary software on CDs should they ever be needed. Also well done for getting everything right out of the box, so users don't need to start hunting for drivers for different hardware elsewhere on the net. Checking Device Manager, all was good. No problems detecting wired and wireless LAN out of the box either .... perfect.

A few other comments:

The reviewer is absolutely right to express appreciation of the keyboard. It's much better than the others we tried, and I certainly wouldn't purchase a keyboard which didn't have the function keys. For one thing with such an odd resolution and small screen that only shows 1/4 of a web page at a time, you'll be wanting to toggle F11 with Internet Explorer to maximise the web page contents.

Speed: Well done Samsung as well for electing to ship with XP SP3 and not Vista. A major selling plus in my point of view with this hardware. This is quite a nippy little machine for general use ... boot up speed beats my Quad Core beast of a desktop by a long way. It's also extremely quiet and stays cool ... another big bonus.

Weight: Wow! Tiny! Lovely! And battery life ... wow! What a difference to a laptop!

I think my only nitpick is the mousepad ... I'd prefer a bigger one, but as you can use an external USB mouse, that's no biggie. The mouse buttons though are fine.

One comment I would make: It's not a laptop. I've seen on several forums people comparing it to a laptop or laptop performance. I think you have to see it for what it is ... a very portable machine to keep you connected wherever you go, rather than an all singing, game performing laptop/workhorse. Although I should add that I am running OpenOffice on it with no problems and haven't gone for the 2MB upgrade yet.

I've married this together with the 12 GB Pay as you go Broadband Starter Kit from 3 (http://www.three.co.uk/Mobile_Broadband/Broadband_Starter_Kit) and now I truly have what I was after: something with a screen much bigger than a palmpilot or phone, that I could get online with pretty much anywhere, without being on a broadband phone contract, and that was still much more portable than my laptop.

This is a perfect combination.

Cheers!

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