Although none of us have even so much as fiddled with it, the Samsung NC10 is the office netbook favorite here, almost exclusively based on its wide reports of a 7 hour battery life. Since it’s selling out in America, it seemed a matter of course for Samsung to announce the successor; the jaw barely pendulums towards the floor at the consequent announcement of the NC20.
More surprising is how weird the specs read. The NC20 is comprised of all the usual bullet points: 160GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11b/g WiFi, Ethernet, a 3-in-1 card reader and a 1.3-megapixel camera. But the silicon brain of the beast is not the ubiquitous Atom, but a 1.3GHz VIA Nano U225… a chip which is close but not quite up to the Atom, drain wise.
And then there’s the screen: 12.1 inches. No. That’s not a netbook, unless the PowerBook is the evolutionary progenitor to the 1000H.
Price is around $642, which is a lot for an overlarge netbook with a bold choice in processor. Let’s see how the battery life tests shake out.
Samsung NC20 [Notebook Italia via Engadget]
