Samsung N210 netbook
Samsung’s N210 netbook is one of the new breed. By which we mean that it offers up to 12 hours of battery life, according to the marketing blurb. It runs Windows 7 and also has an Instant On option called HyperSpace. These features help make it quite a desirable little computer, though the inevitable absence of an optical drive and the fact that it runs Windows 7 Starter Edition will be enough to put many business users off.
That HyperSpace mode is interesting. You can boot into it by pressing F6 when the computer is starting up. But you can also get into it when Windows is running by choosing a desktop icon that reboots into HyperSpace.
Like all instant on options we’ve seen it is not really instant. In fact the boot process takes about 30 seconds. You can populate HyperSpace with some useful apps including Twitter, Gmail, RealPlayer, to do list, and a Web browser. Wi-Fi is accessible. There is even a little word processor which is perfectly good enough for writing straightforward documents and will save to PDF and Word 97-2003 and docx (Word 97) formats among others. There’s a lot more I could say about HyperSpace, but suffice it to note that, as instant on systems go, it is pretty well featured.
The N120 has other strong features. The chiclet keyboard is very comfortable to use, the build is solid, and while the 10.1-inch screen feels a bit on the small side, its 1024 x 600 pixels are enough for Web browsing and editing one document at a time – you’ll be pushed to have two documents opened at the same time. You can get an interpolated resolution to 1024 x 768, though we didn’t find this very satisfactory to work with.
The remaining specs run to Intel’s Atom N450, a 250GB hard drive, Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n, webcam, three USB slots, SD/MMC card reader. The touchpad has some multitouch support for zooming and rotation as well as scroll zones.
We’ve not yet done a full battery rundown test, but if this netbook lives up to our experience with an earlier Samsung model, the N120, then our expectation are high.
More information from Samsung here.
Sandra Vogel