Whilst I was flying over to Canada a two weeks ago my dad produced two laptops from his bag, one I knew he had (a lightweight Toshiba Portege laptop) the other was a Samsung NC10 netbook he had purchased recently. This he said was for me to use while I was abroad as I have some work to do while here on holiday.
So I thought I would take this opportunity to write and in depth review of the device. I am writing this section on the plane literally minutes after 1st seeing the device, I wanted to do this to capture my initial thoughts so I could compare them to how I feel after using it for a couple of weeks.
Initial Impressions
The device is visually stunning, a sleek black look and very light 1.2kg in total. It has a 10” screen that is more than adequately bright on the lowest setting, on the brightest, I fear sunglasses need to be worn to avoid corneal damage, however this brightness may prove to be useful in bright sunlight (of which I am yet to test). The netbook has 3 USB ports a stereo 3.5mm headphone jack and mic port as well as a VGA output a network port and a power socket. It also has an SD card slot on the front.
Speed wise it booted (from button press to login screen) in 31 seconds which is a pretty good time for Windows XP Home, it has an Intel atom N270 processor running at 1.66ghz and 1GB of 800mhz RAM. Most of the netbooks on the market are of a similar stature but not all have the same hard drive as this device. The hard drive is a 160GB HD which upon 1st boot can be configured to either show has 1 HD or partitioned into 2 devices (which my dad chose to do). Some of the netbooks out today have SSD’s and I have had an opportunity to use such devices, for me the boot time is yes faster (I have seen an ASUS load windows in 7seconds on an SSD based device but for running apps there seems to be little difference. The mouse pad is of a pretty standard nature with a scroll bar to the left had side of it and a set of buttons below, however there is no definition to the mouse button, it is one bar across the length of the pad but pressing each side gives you either left or right click, not sure why but this seems to bug me, it certainly does not detract from the ease of use of the device but I think it just needs a line in the middle. The keyboard appears to be a 70 or even 80% size keyboard and the keys are a decent size to type on, I have been using it for 30 mins now and already I am making nearly no mistakes (initially I made a lot) however the backspace key is too small for my liking, that however is me being picky.
Close the lid on the device and by default it goes to standby mode but this can be changed to hibernate if required. The mother board of the device is a standard ACPI compliant intel board with a built in 945 video chipset and a Realtek soundcard. Controlling the networking features of the device are an Atheros wireless chipset and a Yukon network card, again pretty standard to most notebooks.
All in all as initial impressions go this is a good start, a fast device with a great look, plenty of storage space and a decent battery life (specs say 7 hours apparently).
I will pause here for a couple of weeks and write a conclusion after that so I can offer a full scope of the device. Also I can take a few pictures and add them to the post, I fear if this good vibe continues a dent in my wallet may be created 
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Conclusion
Two weeks have now passed and I have used the NC10 everyday for that period. I still indeed like it a lot but there are things that I would have to change (as this is not mine I have not been allowed to change the settings) before I would consider purchasing it.
The mouse pad software is quite poor really, the area of the pad for obvious reasons is quite small and the software used gives you a horizontal and vertical scroll bar on the right side and the bottom of the pad. However the area used takes up so much of the pad so that you have only a small area to actually move the mouse with. Tap too low or too left and it goes into scroll mode. This can however, be changed in the settings so that is not too bad (for me I would switch off the horizontal scrolling all together).
For some strange reason when switching off the device (and I mean actually shutting it down completely) it switches the WiFi back on when you reboot, regardless of it’s state on shutdown. There is no setting you can change either (from what I have seen). The only way you can switch WiFi on and off if is by using the predefined FN an F9 key switch. There is no hardware switch for the Wifi either, so if you are in a wireless forbidden zone (such as a plane) you have to wait for it load up then switch it off BADDD design.
The battery is indeed really really good, I got a full 6.5 hours from the device (with WiFi and Bluetooth off and LCD on lowest brightness) before it told me it needed charging. The LCD brightness is indeed useful in bright light and does not as previously thought cause corneal damage 
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All in all for £300 ($600) it’s a great device and very portable (as a good netbook should be). I don’t think I will be buying one straight away but should I look to buy a netbook I will definitely consider Samsung devices.
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. If I can I will post when I am there but this is all dependant on my connection abilities.