When the MSI Wind U100 made its entry in the world market, it seems that a lot of people were watching, observing, taking notes, and well, imitating. Funny that after the release of ultra slim Wind netbook Samsung comes up with its own NC10. But we’re not here to point at the unimaginative folks. We’re here to see whether this piece of technology is really worth anything.The external characteristics of the Samsung NC10 echoes of two particularly popular releases from two different companies: the Wind MSI that we have mentioned earlier and of course, ASUS eee pc. What makes the Samsung NC10 particularly similar to the ASUS release is that it has quite square edges and corners. Familiar, yes?
The lowdown
By weight, the NC10 is a bit heavier than the Wind variant; though this weight difference might be considered negligible since it’s only a hundred grams plus. Now, the NC10 provides a particularly useful amount of storage, especially for those who are into storing a lot of multimedia (such as videos and mp3s).
Talking of storage, it has 160 gigabytes , back by 1 gigabyte of random access memory. The 1 gigabyte would be sufficient to run multiple applications at once and would hold water even for memory intensive background-running applications such as anti viruses.
The NC10 is also wireless application-ready, and has quite useful Bluetooth features as well. Interestingly, unlike the smaller versions or netbooks, the NC10 has a VGA output and adapter, which makes it doubly useful and places it closer to the functionality that desktop computers have.
Performance-wise
Now aside from these features, the Samsung laptop is suave when you use it to play PC games- with the 1 gigabyte RAM, you are already set to play most of the popular games out there, or you can even force some of the more memory intensive ones if you’re willing to play in a less fast-paced environment.
As for the controls, this one is well balanced, and you would settle perfectly with the kind of balance and symmetry that has been achieved in relation to the three most important input and output components: the keyboard, the touchpad and of course, the sole output for visuals, the screen.
What about power? Unlike other notebooks, who either run on 3 cell or 9 cell batteries, the NC10 runs with batteries that lie on the mid-range: 6 cell batteries that last for up to about 7 hours. Yes, you heard itright. That’s an amazing 7 hours.
With this kind of battery life, you can work the whole day outside your home or far from your office area without worrying about running out of juice- essentially, what you have here is a mid-range laptop with a lot of power, which would be useful for those who are always moving from one place to another, finding no time to settle down during the middle of the day to charge laptop batteries.
All in all, the Samsung NC10 has proven surprising given that it arrived in the scene quite recently- it has a competitive spirit that has the Samsung seal on it.
Italian mobile service provider Wind is evidently living somewhere in the mid-1990s. The Telco is setting up to transport its SIMs on DVD attuned cards: Pop out the SIM and crack the remaining credit card sized portion of plastic into your computers DVD drive. Why? Just To avail the necessary data for Configuration software and documentation. The DVD will enclose the drivers required for your computer to hook up to the internet via cellular networks, and paper instruction manuals will be substituted by electronic descriptions. Wed like to request the executives at Wind one question: "Have you heard of the internet?"