Samsung N150 Netbook

The N150 is a relatively new netbook from Samsung sporting the new Intel Atom N450 processor.  After my last laptop died and after a brief mourning period I decided I’d buy an N150 as a replacement.  Why did I buy a netbook rather than a ‘normal’ laptop?  Well, firstly netbooks are cheaper, and also I don’t need anything particularly high spec as all I plan on doing with it is writing LaTeX and browsing the internet.

I’ve heard stories of people having trouble with netbook keyboards, and although to begin with it does feel a bit odd typing on a reduced size keyboard, it doesn’t take long to get used to it (I’m typing this post on it at the moment).

Another thing I was worried about is that the laptop would be very sluggish, but it seems to be running quite well so far with the AC supply plugged in.  When running on battery however, I’ve noticed that youtube videos can be a bit jittery, and input into the wordpress post editor seems to be a bit laggy (maybe due to frequency stepping).

I’ve not been pushing it very hard – just some light web browsing and MSN – but so far I’m very impressed by the battery life, which so far has been 5 hours with an estimated 2 hours remaining.  The lithium ion battery charged in about an hour from whatever state it was in when it left the box.  I also notice there is a utility that lets you choose whether to allow the laptop to charge the battery to 100% or 80% of its capacity (where charging to 80% supposedly increases the life-span of your battery).

The laptop ships with Windows 7 Starter Edition, but I see that Ubuntu Linux has been reported to run on it ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks#Samsung%20N150 ), so I’ll probably be installing that once I get back to university.  I’m interested to find out whether the multi-touch gestures work under linux, or whether they’re only implemented in the windows driver for the touchpad.  An interesting point is that although this is running a 64bit processor, only a 32bit version of windows is installed.

Anyway, those are my thoughts after living with the laptop for a couple of hours.  Expect another post soon with photos, more information, and whether or not the laptop has survived a couple of day’s use.