I predicted the NC10 would arrive today and was disappointed when i woke up to find nothing in the post. I’d deliberately left my phone on loud all night, expecting to be woken up at about 9am by a courier looking for directions. I got up at about 11.30am and realized i hadn’t got the phone call… dammit.
An hour later, the doorbell rang and i got my NC10. I’ve been on it ever since, installing dozens of applications, tweaking things in XP to save time and power and generally getting used to the look and feel of the NC10 – my first netbook.
First Impressions
It’s impressive i have to say. Lightening quick. I wasn’t expecting it to be so snappy. It comes with 1gb of RAM and XP. Intel deserve credit for the atom processor but i think the switch back to XP (after 8 months or so of using Vista as my primary OS) has really brought it home to me just how bloated Vista really is.
The ONLY thing i miss about Vista is the instant integrated search feature in to the start menu. That’s it.
On the outside, the NC10 is beautiful. Simple, understated, classy… it’s one of the better looking netbooks around. It’s also extremely quiet – so much so i had to search for the fan’s location and lift it up to my ear to hear it 
Keyboard / Touchpad
The keyboard is 93% full size, making it more laptop and less netbook in that department which is good. The ‘enter’ and ‘backspace’ keys do feel squashed to me, but i just have to get use to them. Apart from that, i can type without any problems.
The touchpad is usable, a bit on the small side for my liking but hey, that’s what the VX nano is for 😈 It does have a cool scrolling bar which moves up and down the page as you touch it – i’m not sure if all modern touchpads have this but it’s definitely an essential feature, especially on a netbook.
Screen / Battery
The screen is just right. Any smaller and i would have regretted it, any larger and well, it wouldn’t be a netbook would it 😉 Samsung bundle some really cool power management applications with it which help squeez the last out of the 6 cell battery. The screen has 8 levels of brightness and i’ve been using 3 all day. More than comfortable. When not touched for a minute the screen will auto-dim to lowest brightness possible. Touch it and it’ll pop back instantly to 3.
At the minute, the laptop has been on and used constantly (and heavily) for over 2 and a half hours and it’s at 37% claiming to have just over 3 hours left. It wasn’t 100% charged either out of the box. So battery life isn’t gonna be a problem – it’s probably the reason i got the NC10.
Thumbs Up
The NC10 gets the thumbs up from me. I spent a lot of time researching netbooks and what would suit me best and in the end i’ve bought wisely. It looks the part, performs better than i expected and has that all important killer battery life of 6 hours+. Expect to hear and see more of this NC10 over the next few weeks and little will you know it, but most of my blogging and online work will now be done on this little beast.
Also, Dell today announced they’re cutting 1900 jobs in Limerick and moving to Poland. The day i got my XPS, Dell announced they were cutting 250 jobs in Ireland. All that’s left now is for me to order a laptop and i’ll expect Dell Ireland to shut down completely
On a serious note though, it’ll be a big shock to our government. It’s all healthy though – this is competition at it’s finest. A few years ago it was Ireland 1-0 Poland as polish workers beefed up our workforce and filled any vacant jobs – they helped our economy. Now Poland has hit back and equalized today. 1-1 (if not 1-2). It’s a massive boost for them. They now have the momentum and will have seen us make mistakes – they’ll have learned from that.
That netbook looks really nice! I think the screen resolution is a bit big i would want to change it so everything on the screen looks a bit smaller and not in my face so much.
And as for dell cutting the jobs, hopefully they will have some sort of stock clearance sale and we can all get something nice and cheap, doubtful though 😀