Thread: Samsung's NC310 netbook

This is Samsung's attempt at catching the hip-crowd's attention. The NC-310 has a curvy build throughout which make it easy to hold and carry around. It also makes the netbook look different. The uni-coloured exterior and black interior also add to the coolness. Some people might find the colours a bit tacky, but it's a personal choice; either you like it or you don't. The materials used to build it don't give it a feeling of solidity. Not to say that it's poorly built, but we wouldn't dare to manhandle this one too much. We also wished the neck hinge was a bit stronger.

At 1.23 kg, it can be easily carried around. The glossy screen is adequately bright. Below it is the pebble-style keyboard. This offers an isolated key design; that is slight spacing between each square-shaped key. For typists used to standard keyboards, these could take some time to get used to. But it is worth persevering, and once familiarised, they are quite easy to type on. The only sore point is that the Page Up, Page Down and arrow keys are a bit too closely packed. This makes it too easy to hit the wrong key. The touch-pad also offers good accuracy.

Unfortunately, all the status LEDs are on the inside of the body, next to the touch-pad. Thus you can't see them when the lid is closed. For example, with a closed lid you wouldn't know if your netbook is running or not. The web cam on our unit simply refused to work despite repeated attempts. We therefore weren't able to gauge its quality. Also, it wasn't able to compute a graphics score in the PCMark05 test, thus not giving us a final PCMark score.

The speaker strip is placed above the keyboard on the lower body. It puts out pleasingly clear and unmurned audio. Although the maximum volume isn't very high.

Its 4-cell battery survived for two-and-a-half hours in our battery drain test. Thus it should give 3 to 3.5 hours of up-time under normal usage. The battery life can be termed as quite decent. It also faired reasonably well in our Wi-Fi test.