Samsung has stealthily issued a follow-up to its NC10 netbook and has sensibly changed very little (so little, in fact, that our own Brian X Chen should be able to get OS X running on there again). Laptop Mag was handed a unit before anybody even knew it existed and reviewer Joanna Stern presumably lost her weekend testing it out.
The N110 improves on the few problems with the original. The new model has a proper touchpad this time, bigger at 2.5 x 1.3 inches (the old one measured 2.3 x 1.1 inches) and a higher, more clickable button. This isn’t much, but Stern says it makes a big difference to usability.
The N110 also gains a shinier casing and a rather hideous burgundy stripe (burgundy was a featured color of my grammar school uniform, though, so I might be biased) and more importantly a bigger six cell battery, weighing in at 5900 mAH and giving a rather splendid seven hours of life. The old NC10 was no slouch in this regard, though, giving almost seven hours in normal use and eight hours if everything superflous was switched off.
Best of all, though, is that Samsung hasn’t dicked around with the keyboard. IT’s the same big (93% full-size), easy to use keyboard from the previous model, complete with the proper right-shift key in the proper place.
Otherwise, the specs are the netbook standards: 1.6GHz Atom processor, 160GB hard drive, USB ports and a card reader. The price is a netbook-steep $470, but Stern says that it is “near-perfect."
Samsung N110 [Laptop Mag]
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