The Samsung NC10 is currently riding high. High in the UMPCPortal charts, the most searched-for laptop on a number European price comparison sites, number 2 on the Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de computer chart and rising quickly in many other countries. In my opinion, based on my hands-on and the numerous good reports out there, its one of the best consumer notebooks, yes, notebooks, there is and when I go to the UK in Dec, I’ll be keeping an eye out for a black NC10 with 160GB drive, BT and built-in 3G. If I find one (fingers crossed that this combination of specifications launches soon) then I’m swapping out my Gigabyte M912M and Medion Akoya. I’ll be sad to let the fast, touchscreen M912 go but battery life is more important for me and the NC10 has oodles of it.

Someone that has already bought one is Jez, a regular reader from the UK who I’ve been emailing with recently to find out about the status of the device in the UK. He bought it last week and immediately started to log his experiences on his ‘Unofficial Samsung NC10 blog.’ He’s also been kind enough to write an introduction just for us so before you pop over to the NC10 blog (and possibly never come back!) take a look at what Jez has to say about the NC10…

Read the full story

I apologise for my possibly over-extended coverage of the Samsung NC10 battery life. This will be the last post on the matter I promise.

As we’ve seen in previous Laptop Magazine tests and my brief hands-on last Saturday, the NC10 turns in some impressive battery drain figures.

Laptop Magazine have taken the testing a step further and pushed the NC10 to the absolute limit by dropping in an SSD and disabling the BT radio on their web browsing tests. The result…nearly 8 hours of surfing at minimum brightness.

While this may not be the best of real-life tests, it shows that the underpinnings are efficient and that’s exactly what you need on a mobile device.

The NC10 shouldn’t just be crowned the best netbook out there, it should be crowned the best consumer laptop out there. 10" and an Atom 1.6Ghz is good enough for 9/10 consumers so expect it to eat well into 12 and even 15.4" low-end laptop sales.

All the NC10 details and links to reports in the NC10 reference page.

The Samsung NC10 [Portal page] which is being regarded as one of the best netbooks you can buy, is finally available in the US from Buy.com in white or blue for $499. The netbook has been available in other areas for the world for a short period of time, but is just now coming to the US, just in time for the holidays! For anyone considering this device, be sure to check out the very favorable review by LAPTOP.

[Liliputing]

I’ve already posted about this, twice. Samsung have some great engineers.

I had the chance to look at an NC10 (#1 device on the portal right now) at the netbook meeting in Cologne on Saturday and the first thing I did was to measure the minimum drain of the device. Within minutes, I was seeing a fantastic sub-5W minimum drain.

This is lower than on most UMPCs and is a good indication that the electronics on the motherboard, the power components and the screen are well engineered. There’s no point putting in a low-power CPU if you’re going to lose the advantage it with crappy engineering. Take the Kohjinsha SC3. It uses the latest, lower clock, lower power CPU and chipset and yet even after hours of optimising, the base drain on it is no less than 7.5W. That’s 50% more than the, much bigger NC10 that doesn’t even use the low power CPU and chipset.

Battery life outweighs most requirements for me so considering that everything else on the device is up to scratch, I’m seriously thinking of getting a black NC10 as my only laptop and selling the M912 and Medion Akoya. They’re both excelent devices but neither of them are as well engineered as the NC10

Samsung NC10 links and specs in the product pages.

Remember my in-tent Samsung Q1 Ultra test? 9hrs battery life on the Samsung Q1 with 25% backlight? An average drain of 6.9 watts. It was impressive and since I blew up the Q1 Ultra doing some solar-charging tests, I’ve been missing those 5, 6 and 7hr figures. I was just getting over the trauma until I read this article about another Samsung Mobile product with great battery life.

Notebook Magazine have just done a full set of battery life tests on the NC10 Netbook and it looks like Samsung have once again worked their magic. The tests included continuous Wifi-on web browsing in battery saving mode which is a very reasonable test to be doing. Far better than the misleading 2001 Jeita test and much more ‘real-life’ than the Battery Eater Pro ‘turn everything and and run it at full-steam’ approach. The NC10 returned…

• 12% screen brightness: 7hrs 34mins representing an average drain of about 7.6w which is just a little bit more than what I saw on the Q1 Ultra.
• 50% screen brightness, the duration dropped to 6hrs 30mins which is an average 8.7W.
• 100% screen brightness, the test result reduced to 4hrs 38 minutes which is 12.3 watts drain.

More after the break…

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LAPTOP has gotten their hands on a Samsung NC10 [Portal page] that is fresh off the press (the ‘press’ being Korea). Not content to wait around for a US model, LAPTOP imported an NC10 and it sounds like they really like the machine. Just listen to the opening sentence of their review:

The Samsung NC10 has joined the ranks of 10-inch netbooks—including the Eee PC 1000H, MSI Wind, and Lenovo IdeaPad S10—and it beats them all.

You better believe the NC10 must be pretty good with a statement like that. The review is filled with a lot of positive comments about the NC10, specifically its keyboard and battery life. Back when we first saw the NC10, we had high hopes for the keyboard which appeared to be nice and big. The LAPTOP review says that the keyboard is 93% full sized, and the key placement is nearly perfect. This is great to know when several netbook alternatives have the extremely annoying tiny right shift key, to the right of the up arrow. Unless you are Raon and like to use optical mice to save space on your computers; a large keyboard means that you will have to sacrifice space for some other parts of the netbook, such as the trackpad. LAPTOP tells us that the trackpad is undersized.

In addition to a great keyboard, the NC10 also boasts an impressive battery. A 6-cell battery is standard on the NC10 and will provide you with 7+ hours of use LAPTOP tested the battery with continuous Wi-Fi web surfing and 50% battery life screen brightness; the NC10 responded with an impressive 7 hours and 34 minutes of run time!

Chippy’s Update: Laptopmag ran a second test with 100% screen brightness and got just under 5hrs of wifi-on surfing time. They will re-run the tests with 50% screen brightness to double-check that the screen backlight is having such a big effect. In my opinion, 50% screen brightness could easilty add 2W to the overall drain if it’s a big, bright screen and make a huge difference. Keep a watch on the Laptopmag NC10 review page 3 for updates.

Swing by LaptopMag.com for the full review.

Jkk has managed to find a short story on the ‘Nebraska Library Commission Blog‘ that mentions a list of libraries in the state that are getting hardware courtesy of the Gates Foundation:

The Nebraska Library Commission is proud to announce that the following 48 Nebraska public libraries have been awarded WiFi Connectivity Grants, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Each library will be receiving a Linksys WiFi Router and a Dell laptop or Samsung Q1 Ultra UMPC.

Interesting to say the least. There isn’t much detail on what the Q1Us will be used for at this point, or specifically which model they received, but I would imagine they would be a good tool for taking to the shelf and referencing books without having to return to a stationary computer to look up Dewey Decimal information. A few pictures of the Q1Us and some other donated hardware can be found at this flikr page.

We showed you the upcoming Samsung netbook last week, and now we have some additional information regarding the unit. Samsung is going for the 10" screen range, and the Samsung netbook’s screen will be 10.2" to be exact. Specs don’t really differ very much from what we predicted last week, but here is the latest info (from Pocketables.net):

• 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor
• 1GB RAM
• 10.2" screen (1024 x 600)
• 80GB/120GB/160GB hard drive options
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 1.3MP camera
• 3-in-1 card reader
• 2.9 pounds
• 6-cell battery

Anyone could have guessed the specs and Samsung unfortunately isn’t brining anything new to the table this time around. They could have at least strived for low cost, however it seems as though the netbook, which should release some time in October, will cost about $550 USD.

WhatLaptop.co.uk seems to be the first to have gotten two official images of the Samsung netbook. Click the image in this post to view it full-sized; swing by the site link if you are interested in the keyboard image. The specs and images look so remarkably similar to the Acer Aspire One that I’m typing on right now, that I feel like I’m already using the Samsung netbook… I hope they give it a name soon so I don’t have to continue to call it ‘the Samsung netbook’!

[Liliputing]