Samsung NC10 Netbook « Walking Amongst Dark Shadows

Battery Life:

I thought people were kidding when they mentioned that they had achieved 8hrs+ with their NC10 6 cell battery. I couldn’t have been more wrong as I have clocked up 9hrs 49mins on a full charge, with an average full charge of 8hrs or so. This is with the screen at its lowest brightness setting and the CPU downclocked to 798MHz. I tend to achieve 6hrs with a fully charged 9 cell battery on my XPS1530.

Samsung have developed a non-bloat suite of utilities for their laptops and this carries down to their Netbooks too. Here we have Samsung’s Battery Manager, which adds profiles to the Power Options in XP’s Control Panel. The battery manager too has preset profiles and a custom profile for user settings.

Conclusion

I could go into greater detail with this review but frankly I would just be repeating what a lot of people already know from rapidly browsing through the many positive reviews that already exist on the Internet.

Samsung have beat Asus at their own game. They have produced a lightweight laptop, armed it with lovely looks, a top notch keyboard and incredible battery life. Yet they failed to impress with that very small touchpad. How they have managed to get such high battery life with a hard disk is beyond me. Imagine an NC10 with an SSD!

The NC10 is slightly more expensive than its competitor – the Asus EeePC 901 – and for that you get a higher quality keyboard, and a larger storage solution in the form of a 160GB hard disk. You do lose out on the Draft N Wireless capability of the 901 though, and you do get a smaller Warranty with Samsung – 1 Year as opposed to the 3 Years you get with Asus.

It is a close call between the two machines, and frankly you cannot go wrong with either. I for one am happy that I have chosen the right machine without even trying a demo model in-store.

Update: One omission from this review is the fact that the NC10 comes with a cloth ‘sock’ or mini bag, which is rather thin. It doesn’t at all protect the device and has been pretty much added as an afterthought by Samsung. A minor issue against such a quality device. Lastly you also get two DVD’s – One containing XP SP3 and one containing Samsung’s system software.