Samsung NC20 Review
Reviews
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Enter the newest member of the NC family, the Samsung NC20 ($478 if ordered from overseas; expected price in U.S. is between $500 and $600). This machine has a more spacious 12-inch display and a full-size keyboard, which makes it look more like a traditional notebook than any other netbook to date.
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The Samsung NC20 is a 12.1″ netbook and larger brother to the 10″ NC10. The NC20 offers a larger nearly-full-size keyboard, large 6-cell battery, WXGA resolution display, and the VIA Nano platform. Since the last VIA-based netbook in our office was the Everex CloudBook with less than stellar performance, the biggest thought on our minds is if the VIA Nano can compete against the trusted Intel Atom platform.
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Samsung’s NC20 stands out from the crowd in two very important ways. First, it’s one of only a handful of 12-inch Netbooks (the best-known example being Dell’s Vista-addled Mini 12); secondly, it’s the first laptop we’ve tested with Via’s Nano CPU, intended as an alternative to Intel’s popular Atom processor.
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A slim little laptop with a 12.1″ 1280×800 display, a curb weight of 3.3 lbs, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a webcam and mic, Windows XP, and a rated six hours of battery life. The price? $549. Sounds almost to good to be true, but that’s the exact recipe for the Samsung NC20, believe it or not, and these systems have already begun selling in North America.
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Thanks to its size, the Samsung NC20 is a 12″ netbook that brings an appreciable level of comfort for typing and viewing – two things that their smaller cousins have come under fire for. In our minds, there’s no doubt that PC makers are currently building a 12″ to 13.3″ category of low-cost laptops that cater to a simple customer demand: “good enough” performance, comfortable typing and long battery life.
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I was very surprised by Samsung’s move to ditch Intel’s popular Atom processor in favour of VIA’s Nano alternative in its latest netbook, but in reality it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to the end-user experience. Intel’s Atom processor rules the roost when it comes to netbooks, and while AMD isn’t even trying to go head to head with Intel’s CPU VIA is hoping to capture a piece of the pie with its Nano processor.
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Some might argue that Samsung’s NC20 isn’t really a netbook, with its spacious 12.1-inch screen and full-size, notebook-style keyboard. But its VIA Nano processor, long battery life, lack of an optical drive, and basic selection of ports perfectly fit the netbook mold. Whatever you call it, the NC20 does an excellent job bridging the gap between traditional netbooks and notebooks.
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Finding a netbook with a decent-size screen is almost as difficult as finding one with a full-size keyboard. The Samsung NC20 (21GBK), however, is currently the only netbook that comes with both, and it’s one of maybe three netbooks that house a 12-inch screen. Based on past experience with VIA processing parts, I figured those components in the NC20 (used instead of the common Intel Atom ones) were going to rain on its parade, but the system performed better than I expected.
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Traditional logic dictates that in the technology world everything gets smaller over time. Indeed, this has remained true in the laptop sphere, culminating in the rise and rise of the netbook. And now that darling is tipping things upside down once again. Rather than shrinking, it’s getting bigger.
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The Samsung NC20 is the successor to the hugely popular Samsung NC10 ultraportable netbook released last year. While Samsung was quite late with its netbook launch, as there was too much competition by the time the Samsung NC10 was launched, it did manage to garner great reviews and also a decent amount of market share.
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