Have been looking for a while to get netbook, but all of them have small display, except this one!
One thing I read in the review, even though comes with 12.1" screen, still manage to offer 5 hours+ for surfing the net under medium brightness!
VIA Nano cpu also perform pretty well compared to Atom and support 64-bit.
I personally think 1.5kg is alright if you consider the screen is 12.1", for comparison popular model 10" eeepc 1000 series weight around 1.45+kg.
You will get around 6 hours for 10" but not on 12" screen, in the Netbook market Samsung has one of the longest battery life, their NC110 offer the longest running time.
if you consider the value of Slim DVD worth $100, I still think this is still offer really good value :)
I haven't had the best experiences with Samsung notebook/laptop support. Also Samsung haven't sold laptops in Australia for a while, so I'm not sure how well supported they are in Australia anymore.
From what I'd observed, they use a 3rd party company in NSW to do their support, where they courier your laptop from whereever you are, to NSW. Even though you don't pay for shipping, the service isn't the best.
My $3000 laptop from 2.5 years ago was having intermittent problems, keyboard and trackpad dies, and I have to reboot losing my work. It came with a 3 year warranty.
Over the phone, the technician suggested it's better to have a laptop with some problems than a laptop which you can't use. So he didn't even do anything to the laptop to fix it!
By comparison, I've had two intermittent issues with my 1.5 year old Dell laptop. Dell came next business day, and replaced any parts which MIGHT have a problem. And I didn't have to send my laptop anywhere, they came to my house and workplace.
If looking at the NC20 to overcome 1024x600 resolution of most 10/8.9" netbooks, consider the 1280x768 8.9" HP Mini 2133 (slower/hotter cpu and 3-cell though), from as low as $499, or an US imported 1366x768 10.1" HP 2140 as discussed at http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1118180&p… . Both costing less than this deal.
Comparative CPU performance and power consumption is at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=370158 .
So those VIA Nano U2250 are around 40% faster than N270? Looks nice.
For $959 you could almost get that Aldi 12" notebook with much powerful Pentium chip and 4GB of RAM (although much heavier). I think ideal netbook should still be around $400-$500 range…
A little heavy (1.52kg with 6cell) and on the expensive side.
However it is a bargain, since cheapest is $950 @ LMC but without dvd writer.
The Via chipset does suck up more power overall though. Most atom based netbooks gets upto 7+ hours, some even get up to 9-10hours.
Even the Asus N10 which is the only Netbook to have a dedicated graphics card (Nvidia 9300) still has battery life of 6+ hours while using it. And switchable to Intel Graphics if want to save battery.
Overall, I'm just gonna wait it out, cuz supposedly a Nvidia Ion based Netbook is gonna hit the market soon.