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August 25, 2009

Samsung NC20 review

Product Code: NP-NC20-KA01UK

The Samsung NC20 is an upscale netbook that is almost as bulky as a standard laptop, without the full features.

Netbooks are all the rage these days, and some companies, such as Dell, are practically giving them away. So of course, someone's bound to bulk up a netbook. The 10in screens that max out at 1024-by-600 resolution seem just too restrictive. And how about throwing in better battery life, too?

That's the thinking behind the Samsung NC20. The 12.1in screen offers a full 1280 by 800 pixels - enough for true 720p high-definition playback. The good news is that playback of DVDs and 720p high-def movies does look pretty good, and the frame rate is fairly smooth. The display, while adequate, won't win awards for colour fidelity or contrast. Black levels and viewing angles are the limiting factors, given that this panel seems to be a 6-bits-per-pixel TN type.

Unfortunately, the Samsung NC20's display, like those of many current laptops, has one of those glossy-finish screens that make reading and viewing media difficult when there's any glare whatsoever. By comparison, two other netbooks currently host 12in displays: Lenovo's IdeaPad S12 and the HP Pavilion dv2 (HP's machine is technically a tweener-class netbook/notebook).

The bad news: audio is pretty poor through the speakers, and why would you want to lug this around just to play movies? We say "lug" because this machine is a little weighty. With the power brick, it's 1.5kg. And it measures closer in size to a laptop than many netbooks - 292.4x217x307mm.

To be fair, the Samsung NC20 has a lot of things going for it. That extra girth enables a more robust keyboard layout, making typing less of a chore than on some netbooks. However, you have to press the function (Fn) key when using Home or End - keys often used in word processing or browsing the web.

The Samsung NC20's trackpad is a little wonky as well. It's got a single button; press the button on the left side, and it's a left mouse button; press it on the right side, and you get a context click. But it's easy to get it wrong if you strike near the centre of the bar. We'd have preferred two distinct buttons.

All the I/O ports are on the two sides, not buried in the rear. One USB, VGA, audio, and ethernet port each grace the left side, while the right panel contains two more USB 2.0 ports, a Kensington lock slot, and the power connector. The Samsung NC20's SD card slot is recessed slightly under a lip in the front, but is still readily accessible. That's about it. Nothing mind-blowing or new compared to what's already on the market.

Performance is a different matter. The Via Nano processor seemed to chug a bit if we opened up more than about six tabs in Mozilla Firefox 3.5. Microsoft Word 2007 also ran pretty slowly, with visible stuttering through scrolling of large documents. It's odd that DVD playback is crisp and smooth, while scrolling a Word or Excel file is on the slow side. And you wouldn't want to run any games on the Samsung NC20, even though the built-in S3 Chrome graphics is theoretically DirectX 9-capable. Some older games may run, but there's just not enough main memory after allocating 128MB for graphics.

But let's put all that in a little bit of perspective here. The average netbook, powered by an Intel Atom CPU, scores about 36 in our WorldBench 6 tests. The Samsung NC20 clocks a 41. Hardly a speed demon, but a slight clip faster. As for battery life, it survives for 5 hours, 53 minutes on a charge, which is toward the higher end of the netbook spectrum. (To date, Toshiba's NB205-310, with its nearly 10-hour battery life, has yet to be unseated.)

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Independent customer reviews from

Samsung NC20 scored:
8.7 out of 10 100% real reviews

The 2 most helpful reviews based on 40 reviews:

07 Apr 2009 Anonymous verified purchaser

9

Good Points

Great netbook. V ery pleased with it. I did buy it though just for use of the internet and documents.

Bad Points

It does, however, take a while to load up every time you turn it on, which can be a bit frustrating if you are in a hurry to look something up. Not yet sure about XP - pop up after popup! Although I do understand why they chose it.

13 Jul 2009 Henry, Southampton

9

Good Points

Everything about the machine is great, light, good size keyboard, stylish, excellent build quality, screen res is outstanding. And the battery lasts a looong time. I've added extra ram to mine and it's a real little flyer. There's no optical drive but how often do you use one these days. I've bought a stand alone cd/dvd combo drive that I can use when needed. there are 3 usb slots and a card reader so moving large amounts of data elsewhere is not a problem.

Bad Points

Couple very small niggles, the touch pad would maybe benefit from being a little wider and there's no defined edge to it so your finger can wander off and you have to keep looking down. It only comes with 1 gig of ram, not a real problem as replacing it with 2 gig was a doddle. With the price of ram so low Samsung shouldn't be so mean, they should have fitted 2 as standard.

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