Keyboard and Touchpad:
The NC10′s keyboard is, from what I have read from user reviews to be one of the best to ever hit a netbook, or even a laptop. I am happy to say I can thoroughly agree.
It is about 5% smaller than your regular laptop keyboard and is a joy to use. Key positioning and tactile feedback is just perfect. This entire review has been written, then lost (thanks wordpress) and then re-written again all in a couple of hours using the NC10 and Google Documents (cheers Pr). My only complaint is the lack of dedicated Home and End keys, which are located on dual function Page Up/Page Down keys and can be accessed via the Fn key. If you rely on those two keys a lot (as a touch typist I do) then it will break up your typing flow quite a lot as you reach for the Fn key.
Whereas we’ve had joyful reviews of the keyboard, reviews of the Touchpad have been rather poor. Once again I can safely say that it is just that.
Whilst the touchpad itself is smooth, responsive and sensitive enough with its multi-touch capabilities. It’s vertical size is just poor and a lot of the time you’ll end up with your fingers crashing into the space bar instead. The horizontal size is just fine.
As stated, the Synaptics pad supports multi-touch so I have modded mine by downloading a wonderful piece of software that enables MacBook style two finger scrolling. It works superbly. To gain the maximum touchpad space I have switched off the vertical and horizontal scroll zones on the pad.
I feel I should mention the touchpad buttons or button as is the case. What we have here is ‘rocker’ button. A single piece of plastic that can depress a microswitch on either side – no where near as good as two dedicated buttons, and something Samsung really shouldn’t have implemented. This is a big mistake for one reason – most laptops allow you to depress both buttons simultaneously to simulate a middle click. You can’t do that here…so no middle clicking Firefox tabs to close them. I could be wrong with this latter point as it is still early days – if anyone can correct me on this, please do so.
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