24 Jun, 2009
The Samsung NC20 12.1-inch Mini Laptop Review
Posted by: MiddleBar.com In: Laptop Reviews
I was looking for a light weight notebook at an affordable price. The 10″ netbooks were not suitable for me for few reasons (10″ does not have a comfortable key board, too much scrolling, Intel Atom processor is not good for movies). So I was left with two choices. Dell Mini 12 or a long wait for Samsung NC20. I waited and waited for the black one. This is an excellent notebook. I call it a notebook since it is powerful enough to do little processor intensive tasks. The keyboard is very comfortable. 160GB hard disk is sufficient for me. When it fills up, i can replace it with a higher capacity hard disk if I want to which was not possible in Dell mini 12. The display is sharp and bright. The finish of the laptop is excellent. While watching movies the processor is not overloaded unlike atom. That gives a smooth movie experience on a comfortable screen size. The battery life is 4 hours plus is quite an advantage. I do not take the charger with me. That saves about half kilogram in weight. I do not know of any other laptop/netbook weighing less than 2 kilograms with 12″ or more screen size with 4 hours battery life for less than £400. So I am quite happy about what I waited for. I was using an old notebook with its page-up/down keys on the top right hand side corner. In NC20 it is near the up/down arrow keys. This is more convenient but took a few days to adjust myself.
But there are few things that I would like to have differently.
1) The charger and its wires are heavy, messy and not flexible. It could have been better, thinner and more flexible. The charger output is 19V, 2.1A. That means about 40W. Its mains wire is as thick as that of a 1kW iron box. Remember that there is no space for this charger in the sleeve Samsung provides with NC20.
2) I would like to have a small pouch for charger and its wires.
3) It looks to me it is like taking long time to charge the battery to full (2 hours or more.)
4)The short right shift key and the position of backslash key near right shift key is a trouble at least at the beginning.
5) Samsung should have given an official upgrade to 2GB RAM.
6) Linux users will have some trouble with the display drivers. Openchrome is not stable yet for NC20. Jaunty does not install out of the box. WLAN also does not work out of the box in NC20. This is one reason I can not give top score to NC20.
7) Samsung could give an Ubuntu version of NC20. It would have saved me money as I an not windows user. I have all the free productivity/office tools in Ubuntu.
Sometimes it is difficult to feel the boundary of touch pad. A little different texture of the touch pad would have solved it. Until then they could fix the big Samsung sticker on the right hand side. It will act as guide for right handers like me.
9) The sleeve that comes with NC20 is very convenient and light. But it may not protect the netbook as it is very thin.
10) I think the processor (VIA Nano) heats up a little bit. There is a fan running. This is one disadvantage compared to Dell Mini 12 which I guess is fan-less.
