A tiny toughbook
The netbook craze shows no signs of abating this year, with the three major manufacturers leading the mini-laptop charge – Taiwanese companies Asus (Seashell), Acer (Aspire One) and MSI (Wind) – bringing out faster, slimmer and more attractive machines with increasingly better battery life.
Samsung has decided to shake things up, following up its cracking little NC10 netbook from last year with its latest chunky, funky-looking N310. Designed by Japanese artist Naoto Fukasawa, these round-edged, cutesy machines are available in a range of cool colours including orange, mint blue and business-like black. It is rare for us to test out a netbook that gets as much attention as this one got from passers-by in the office, many of whom stopped to coo over the machine while wantonly stroking its rubbery exterior.
And Sammy’s latest has quickly become one of our favourite ‘puters to take on our travels to use when we are away from the comfort zones of our homes or desks – mainly due to the fact that, in addition to looking the part, it feels tough and rugged and thus you feel happy to chuck it in your manbag and sling it over your shoulder as you head out the door.
So it sports the looks, it works well as a ‘toughbook’ and, perhaps most importantly, it has one of the best pebble design keyboards we have had the pleasures of running our fingers over on a netbook. The keyboard is an impressive 94 percent of a full-size QWERTY and is on par with our favourite Apple MacBooks and Sony Vaios.
The painful memories of our thick-set gentleman-fingers arguing with those horrible tiny keyboards on the initial batch of Asus Eee PCs a couple of years ago quickly fade into the past after a few minutes of happily knocking out copy on an N310...
Specs wise, we have to admit that there’s nothing that really stands out here. You get the (now standard) 10.1-inch screen with a 1024x600 resolution, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, the (also now standard) Intel Atom processor, 1024MB of memory, a 160GB hard drive (which is more than enough for most iTunes libraries) and an integrated Intel GMA 950 graphical processing unit (GPU).
The only real downers here are the slightly poor battery life (around three hours for normal use) and the price tag. At £399 you could probably pick up a pretty decent, full-size, respectively-specced laptop from your local Tesco or Aldi. But if money is not too tight to mention and you are in the market for a nice-looking fashion-over-function netbook, Samsung’s N310 is easily the next best thing to Sony’s (£800-plus) Vaio P series.
But if you want something a little cheaper that will do the business on-the-go but might not turn so many heads then you should still look towards the latest models from the likes of Acer, MSI and Asus – all of which come in much closer to the £300 mark.
0 Comments