Samsung 305U1A
Like the Lenovo, this Samsung 11.6-incher disappoints with its relatively weak battery life: under four hours. It too has a nice, large 1366 x 768 panel, and comes with a 500GB hard drive, the largest storage unit here. Its AMD E450 processor - clock speed: 1.7GHz - delivers a decent performance, good enough for gaming, helped by 4GB of Ram. The downside a poor battery life, less than four hours in fact. It's not as if this machine is particularly skinny, either. I'm not sure about the rough-textured wrist rest area, but this is a good-looking machine with a decent, non-glossy screen. The display's colour saturation holds up well next to the glossy screens.
Reg Rating 70%
Price £300
More Info Samsung
Samsung NP-N102SP
Samsung's traditional netbook offering impresses - at least in terms of battery life. You'll get eight hours or so out of this boy, more if you down the screen brightness and disable Wi-Fi, though that's true of the others too. Packing it with a big battery means this is one of the chunkiest machines here. That said, this may well be the netbook to choose if you don't want a glossy, glary screen - the N102SP has a matt panel, giving it bit of an old-school look. It also has an unusual, not-listed-by-Intel Atom chip, the 1.6GHz dual-core N2100. It has half the cache of the N2600 - 512KB to 1MB - but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference here.
Reg Rating 75%
Price £220
More Info Samsung
Next page: Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook
COMMENTS
Asus Eee PC 1015BX: "at up to 26mm thick, it's one of the chunkiest netbooks here"
Asus Eee PC X101CH: "just under an inch at its thickest point making it one of the thinnest machines here'
Seriously? 0.6mm between thinnest and chunkiest?
There's a reason for El Reg units, you know.
and while we're at it, where's the EEE girl?
How much of that price is the Windows tax?
Netbooks really shine when you put something like Linux on them. Just a pity you can't buy any without paying Windows tax.
Still too expensive...
When netbooks first came out three or four years ago, they were £229 or thereabouts. And they are STILL that sort of price. They've got slightly better specs - but that's all.
They seem to be the only form of computer life which doesn't go down in price. I cannot see any good reason why they shouldn't be sub-£150 these days.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if Asus or Acer were to produce a fairly minimal spec box for £149. I reckon it would fly off the shelves.
Not quite...
"I'm assuming the thumbs are mostly industry shills."
Everyone who disagrees with you must be an industry shill - couldn't possibly be because your writings are somewhat of the n00b could it.
Win7 Starter is limited to 2GB, Wikipedia would have told you that if you'd bothered to research before upgrade, it would also have revealed Starter is 32bit so if you did an in-place upgrade then the resultant Home/Pro will also be 32bit and thus not fully utilise your 4GB as "any fule no".
Try installing from a USB stick (very very easy to do, Google it) a 64bit version, you can pop the 64bit ethernet or wifi driver on the same USB stick and install it afterwards and then you can just visit Windows update or download whatever drivers you need direct. Simples?
Lin Line Lin Line Ux
I got my AAO for under £150 a few years ago.
Great wee machine, still gets a lot of use.
It's Linux distro allowed it to come in at such a low price, and with a fairly low spec still run very well. Boot up into Linpus is seconds, and you have your browser, office suite and documents in front of you.
(Of course I later upgraded the RAM and Wireless card and triple boot with XP and a certain OS that rhymes with Oh Ess Ex)
Windows 7 killed the Netbook through Windows tax, the need for notebook/desktop specs to run, and when they finally relented and released the Starter edition - it is so cut down that you can't even easily change the wallpaper! (there are tricks to get around this)
Sceptical about ChromeOS, I want my data on my machine, not in someone else's fog-- I mean, cloud.
