Samsung Go N310 – Bling Bling Bling

Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Stunner in the looks department, long battery life, a sure headturner, comfortable keypad, less boot time.

Thumbs down: exorbitant price tag even the features are like most of the other netbooks,  the in your face Samsung logo.

Inside the trunk:

• Processor: Intel Atom (1.6 GHz)
• RAM installed: 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
• Hard drive size: 160 GB

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: Most of  the netbooks making their presence felt nowadays essentially have the same configuration. Get together an Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a copy of Windows XP and voila what do I have… another netbook. With this latest one, Samsung hasn’t done any better than just combining the recipe for the same old cake and just topping it all up with some quality icing. Well, leaving aside the superfluous metaphors I ll proceed with the review.

Razzle-dazzle: Okay, I really have to give this one to Sammy… they ve come up with some killer looks for this child of theirs and I d bet on anything to say that this is the best looking netbook in the market. Though a few might argue that the pebble look that this one sports makes it look a bit like its not for professional use or possibly even a bit like a toy. But then again having such a fun piece with vibrant colours could just make your dull and boring day at work a bit more animated. Yeah its lid is available in different colours like bright orange, black, navy blue and light blue. Unlike the glossy covering that most of the netbooks these days boast of which more often than not act as fingerprint magnets this one has a grainy and rubberized cover which is far more durable and looks classy too. It has got the Samsung logo on its back which just cannot be missed even if your like standing at half a miles distance. Anyways, leaving the hyperboles aside this one has two USB ports on the right side along with a VGA port and on the left side it again has an USB port with a headphone jack and an Ethernet jack. To avoid inconvenience all the ports have been placed either in the front or on the sides.

Not that the earlier keyboards by Samsung were not impressive but this one gets the numero uno position on my list of most comfortable to use keyboards. And for all the bacteria skittish users, this one really has something good to offer. The keys are treated with nano-sized silver particles which protect you from bacteria. From the very second that I started using this keyboard I almost fell in love with it.

The touchpad at 2.5 x 1.3 inches is pretty much comfortable but the only glitch I guess this one has is that it comes along with a single rocker button. I personally prefer the two button rocker so this was kind of disappointing.

This one being a 10 incher netbook has a resolution of 1024 x 600-pixel although most of the netbooks which fall in this price range have a resolution of 1,366×768. Anyways,  the width is pretty much decent and can be easily used at work where you have to keep several documents open side by side. Though the display produces glare when tilted in the direction of light, it isn’t distracting at all.

Inside dope: Well, netbooks are machines which cannot be expected to perform anything more than probably browsing the web, sending mails, and document processing. And keeping these standards in mind I must say that this netbook fits into the norms set by its predecessors pretty well.

Talking about the tests we put it through, the Go was pretty much able to handle the mobile tasks and performed somewhere along the category average. This one could also be used to view 720p videos very smoothly. There were hardly any jerks and the videos were pretty much non-grainy. Also it booted the Windows XP around 10 secs faster than the normal category average.

It comes loaded with a 1.3 megapixel web camera which came up with really clear images during a skype video chat. Also the person on the other side could clearly make out the details on our face. Coming to the speakers, the inbuilt speakers of this netbook were loud enough and did not actually require headphones. But as always it’s always better to be using a headphone for better sound quality. “ ulysess” by Franz Ferdinand when played over slacker.com could be heard loudly and clearly even over the speakers.

It comes along with a 6-cell battery and ran for over 5 hours and 51 minutes on the video playback drain test. Though the battery is kind of huge it really doesn’t jut out at the back. And it doesn’t even make the netbook any bulkier than the normal netbooks.

Nitty-gritty: I would give it a 5 on 5 as far as looks are compared. The performance is pretty much average, as in I don’t think performance it has anything more to offer as compared to the regular netbooks. Its almost on par with most of the other netbooks as far performance is concerned. I could go on and on blabbering about it mind blowing looks but then the price tag really gets me too a pause. Accompanied with a $449 price tag this one is a tad bit too expensive. But then again if your looking out for an unusual combination of looks too die for and endurance at the same time then probably the binge would be worth it.

My rating: 3.5 on 5

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