Samsung N110 review

Samsung has a bevy of netbooks out with bafflingly similar names. The N110 and larger N120, which we recently reviewed, are follow-ups to the NC10, which despite its generic looks, we liked for its long battery life.

The N110 manages to cram a six-cell battery into a fairly slim frame, and also fixes the NC10's too-small touch pad. But, at almost £350, it's more expensive than the competition, despite offering the same Intel Atom, 160GB hard drive and 1GB RAM components. 

Design
The Samsung N110 is a fairly anonymous-looking netbook, with a matte-black interior (accented by a very subtle maroon stripe around the outer edge) and a glossy, black lid. Unfortunately, the glossy surface of the lid was among the more smudge- and fingerprint-friendly we've encountered, and keeping it looking clean for even a single day was a struggle. While not as thin as something like the HP Mini 1000, Samsung gets points for making a netbook with a six-cell battery that doesn't look like it has a kickstand.

The keyboard is of the more traditional tapered key design, with individual keys that are wider at the base, and narrower at the top. We've seen many more PC makers, including Dell, HP and Asus, move to a flat-key design. Still, the keys were large and we were especially pleased to see a big right-shift key -- that's one that sometimes gets butchered on compact keyboard layouts. The trackpad on the N110 is slightly larger than on the original, and is about as good as we've seen on a netbook -- it even includes a specially demarcated scroll zone.

Features
The 10.1-inch LCD display has a native resolution of 1,024x600 pixels, which is standard for netbooks. That's generally fine for most Web surfing, but long, vertical pages and Word documents can require plenty of scrolling to read. We were, however, disappointed to see the matte screen finish of the original NC10 replaced with a glossy one. Most consumer laptops have glossy screens, but we generally find that the glare on the overly reflective glossy surface outweighs advantages, which include more vibrant colours and better overall brightness.

While it lacks the ExpressCard readers found on several other netbooks in this price range, we were pleased to see three USB ports -- many netbooks have only two.

Performance
With Intel's 1.6GHz Atom CPU and 1GB of RAM, there aren't a lot of surprises with the N110's performance. We've found that systems with AMD's Neo processor and Via Nano CPU -- both aimed at a similar netbook audience -- are slightly better at single-app tests, while the Atom performs faster in our multitasking test.

For basic tasks such as word processing, Web surfing and email, an Atom-powered netbook is more than adequate, as long as you keep your expectations modest. Opening too many browser windows at once or running several apps simultaneously, for example, can lead to slowdown and stuttering.

The N110 ran for 6 hours and 8 minutes on our video playback battery drain test, using the included six-cell battery. That's fantastic, especially considering that our battery drain test is especially gruelling. Only the Acer Aspire One D150 did better among netbooks, and even then only by about 10 minutes.