The Samsung N150 is a thin, sleek netbook with a glossy black lid and a matt black plastic case with a sparkle to it. A red stripe, fast becoming a trademark of Samsung's laptops, runs around the edge of the case, and has a shiny metallic finish. As well as being a great-looking design, it's a very well-made netbook, with hardly any flex in the lid.
The reminders and notifications from McAfee Antivirus, Samsung Update Plus, Samsung Recovery, and Samsung FailSafe software pop up while you’re trying to access a web page to load or when you’re in the middle of writing a Word document. You have to either activate the McAfee Antivirus software or uninstall it.
Integrating the aforementioned items onto the CPU eliminates the need for a separate, power-hungry chip housing these elements. Instead, they're taken care of by the N450 itself, with everything else handled by Intel's new NM10 Express chipset. This architecture leads to a total power draw of just 7.6W. This is approximately a 40 per cent reduction in power consumption over the previous Atom architecture, which drew around 11.8W.
Not much, really. The N150's innards are interesting and original, but its chassis isn't particularly ground-breaking. The glossy black lid and its off-centre Samsung logo are pleasant enough -- provided you don't mind having to clean fingerprint smudges off regularly -- and the anodised red stripe around the sides adds charm.
Sitting above the keyboard is a typically impressive Samsung screen. The LED-backlit panel is one of the brightness we’ve seen on a netbook, and quality also passes muster, with accurate colours and sharp detail. The native resolution of 1,280 x 600 pixels is our only minor complaint, and occasionally sees applications running at 1,024 x 768 disappear below the taskbar.
Design wise the Samsung N150 is a lightweight device (1.24kg) that comes in a dulled white or black plastic shell. That plastic isn't that luxurious in its design compared to netbooks from the likes of HP or Toshiba, making this appear rather cheap.
That said, the outside sports a fairly inoffensive design that is simple and to the point. Connections are to be found down either side, with the underneath offering access to the removable battery, as well as the computer's RAM.
A 250GB hard drive is installed - which is now the standard capacity for a netbook - and it recorded an average transfer rate of 25.54 megabytes per second (MBps) in our tests. This isn’t as fast a rate as the HP Mini 5102 (26.17MBps) and HP Mini 210 (27.53MBps) achieved, but it’s much better than the Toshiba NB300 and Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t.
The graphics performance of the N150 is dependant upon the integrated graphics controller in the Intel Atom N450 CPU and it’s not fast. You won’t be able to play anything but the simplest of games on the Samsung N150 (games that don’t use complex graphics for example), and even Flash-based games may run sluggishly on it.
Either way, the 1024x600 resolution of the screen isn’t high enough to display most games anyway. There is a Samsung utility called Easy Resolution that can be used to bump up the resolution to 1024x768 (you can do the same thing from the Intel Display Driver properties), but it makes the screen look squished. Standard definition Xvid-encoded videos will play smoothly, but anything higher than standard definition will put too much stress on the system.
Samsung N150 design
The same however can't be said for the buttons bar, which we had trouble pressing easily. It's a simple problem that could have been fixed by making the bar slightly wider. Meanwhile above the screen is a 0.3 megapixel webcam, while sound is provided by SRS TruSound XT to please the multimedia fan in you.
The Samsung N150 will appeal to anyone who puts battery life at the top of their list of priorities, but it's not massively different to previous-generation machines and its keyboard isn't quite as good as those on rivals such as the Eee PC 1000HE.
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.look4articles.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.look4articles.com/images/rss.jpg "XML Feed For RSS")