Design and features
It's been a while since Samsung has played in the Australian laptop market, but now it's back — and with a plan to boot. While it plans to go big once Windows 7 has launched, right now it's establishing a foothold in both the netbook and notebook space. Considering its netbooks have had good reviews in other countries, it made sense that the N120 was one of its first releases in Australia.
The all-white N120 has a matte finish which is simply nice to touch. The curved edges give the netbook an illusion of slimness and silver trim along the left and right sides and silver hinges give it a hint of style. In fact, the N120 is definitely one of the more attractive netbooks we've seen, with tiny little touches that make us like it quite a lot.
Take the lid — it's slightly shorter than the base so you can see the status lights when it's closed. Or the little logos on the inside that correlate to the ports on the side, cutting down time on the inevitable port hunt when you're trying to plug something in. But most impressively, Samsung has managed to jam a full-sized keyboard into a 10-inch netbook, making for one of the more comfortable typing experiences we've had.
Annoyingly, the Windows key has been put on the right-hand side instead of the left, and the right-click button on the left instead of the right, doubling as a function key. It's not a deal breaker, but the flipped layout took some getting used to. It's worth mentioning here that adjusting brightness of the 1024x600 LED screen through the function keys did not work (although we expect this to be fixed in a software update), but the sound was better than we expected to be on a netbook.
The port complement is standard — three USB, 100Mb Ethernet, VGA and microphone/headphone jacks. An SD card reader is situated at the lip on the right-hand side. Internally it's standard too, with an 802.11g Atheros wireless chip, a Samsung 160GB hard drive and the usual Atom N270 1.6GHz processor, 1GB RAM and runs on Windows XP Home. The software bundle is lighter than most, with Google toolbar for Internet Explorer and McAfee installed for antivirus. A thin black pouch is included to protect it while carrying.
Performance
The N120 is a netbook through and through — you're not buying it for performance, you're buying it as a small PC you can take with you wherever you go. As such benchmarking it feels futile, but more important is its battery life. Turning all power-saving features off, setting screen brightness and volume to maximum and playing back an Xvid file, the battery lasted five hours, 29 minutes and eight seconds.
Samsung's netbook is an excellent entry into the Australian market, and an incredibly tempting buy for anyone looking in this space.
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So much lighter than my Dell Vostro 1300. Great battery life. Case appears to be quite sturdy. Available at Ebay US under A$700 with 2GB memory.