Design and Build Quality:
The whole unit sports a very clean, smooth look to it, with Samsung’s love for glossy black plastic – mostly seen on their LCD/Plasma HD Televisions. The top lid, which houses the TFT display has this lovely fingerprint, dust attracting glossy finish to it and it looks great – when devoid of fingerprints!
It has a footprint measuring 10.3 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches and weighs in at just 2.6 pounds (1.2kg). Minus the battery the unit weighs as much as my iPhone 3G – That is quite staggering.
Port placement around the unit is nothing special. The right side houses a VGA D-SUB, a single USB 2.0 port, and headphone and microphone sockets. The left side houses a 10/100 Ethernet port, two USB 2.0 ports and a power-in socket.
The front of the unit gets top marks from me because it sports numerous blue LED status indicators, which can easily be seen even with the lid closed. Also situated on the front is a 3-in-1 SD card reader capable of reading SD, SDHC and MMC cards.
The underside of the unit has adequate ventilation slots for when, sorry if the unit gets hot. I say this because I have yet to even hear the NC10′s internal fan activate, let alone hear it or the hard disk. The whole machine is astonishingly silent.
Display and Sound:
The NC10 sports a 10.2" TFT display that has a native resolution of 1024×600. Display quality is both bright and crisp with good viewing angles. Brightness can be controlled with the included Samsung software and at it’s brightest the display is positively blinding. I tend to use the screen at it’s lowest setting. Viewing angles are very good too, from the sides and bottom. When viewing the screen from above though, there is that inverse effect. This display is not a glossy one, as some NC10 users have reported getting lately.
Also included towards the top of the TFT panel is a Namuga 1.3MP webcam. It has decent quality when I tried it but is one of those built in devices I will never ever use. Sound on the NC10 is somewhat of a disappointment, not that I was expecting good audio anyway. The built in speakers are on the underside of the machine and from what I could ascertain at this early stage sounded rather poor during 720p HD playback. Voices seemed rather muffled and non-recognisable. Nothing that the Creative Xmod cannot resolve mind you…
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