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Samsung 305U1A

RH Numbers

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.

Samsung 305U1A

Reg Rating 70%
Price £300
More Info Samsung

Samsung NP-N102SP

RH Numbers
RH Recommended Medal

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.

Samsung NP-N102SP

Reg Rating 75%
Price £220
More Info Samsung

Cloud based data management

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?

12
0

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.

11
1

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.

10
0

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