After spending weeks looking for a netbook I ended up with this pretty much out of desperation really. I hurt my wrist and was doing a really awful job of note-taking in lectures, so after faffing around for too long, this was all that was in stock anywhere locally. I picked it up for just under £200 and for that it came with a handy netbook bag and a years antivirus by a company I've never heard of.. but I digress.

Being a bit of a technophobe I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for, and basically just wanted something with a long battery life that I could record my notes on, do a bit of browsing and occasionally play a few games. And this is pretty much what I got. The internet connection can be tediously slow sometimes, its true - but this isnt so much an issue for me, as I tend to use my rather ancient laptop for that anyway if I'm not out and about. The memory isnt fantastic either, but you can always use an external drive for this if you need to (I use a pen drive so its more than adequate).

Although the advertised 11 hour battery life is probably stretching a bit, I found it managed a 9-5 day perfectly well if you were not constantly connected to the internet. It comes with Windows Home Starter, which seems to be pretty much standard for netbooks and which once again met my needs perfectly. This is upgradeable where required - it is already on the machine, you just purchase a keycode to unlock it.

Coming to the actual netbook itsself - well it looks quite good, in matt black with small red Samsung logo on the front. The screen is fine and the keys are well-sized for something so small, although the right-hand shift button seems further over to the right than usual, so capitalising stuff takes some "retraining" if you touch-type like me. The touchpad mouse is quite slippery, although this might just be because its new - and I found the mouse buttons quite stiff too. It is really lightweight, around 1.2kg so probably less effort than carrying a load of paperwork around!

The AC cable has been good and sturdy so far - I dont have a great record with those, usually needing to replace them every few months, so I'm quite impressed. Manuals are good and thorough (all four of them!) and even the external packaging looks good! However I am a bit baffled as to why it comes with some kind of recovery disk when there isnt a CD-ROM drive, but what do I know?