I bought the Samsung NC10 in April 2009 on a whim to tide me over when my IBM T60 crashed. At the time, I had done all my research, with all conclusions pointing towards the NC10 as the gold standard netbook. Now, 1 1/2 years on, I thought I would post a review so that those looking for information on its reliability can have something to go on. Just so everone is aware, the NC10 I am reviewing comes with factory specifications, although I have added an extra GB of RAM.

General: the NC10 is small, stylish and well-constructed. There are, amongst others, 3 USB ports, a VGA port, ethernet port and 2 3.5mm jacks. The power button initially took me some time to find. Its on te right side of the netbook, on the hinge itself. I initially thought it to be a strange place for a power button, but have now gotten ued to it and think it works fine. There is no DVD drive built-in.

Battery life: this is excellent. I can go up to 8hours still witout charging. I have used it every other day for a few hours each day, and almost constantly when I am travelling. The charger is also smaller than most other laptop chargers, and consequently quite easy to carry around.

Performance: the netbook has performed much better than I thought it would. I usually have Outlook, Chrome and Word (sometimes with Windows Media Player as well) running simultaneously, and have never had a problem with lag. The model I bought came bundled with Windows XP. I upgraded it to Windows 7 when that came out, and have found performance to be even better than it was.

Screen: this is not the most dazzling display ever. However it is good enough for the functions a netbook sells itself on - word processing, emailing and browsing on the go. If you want to watch videos a lot, however, I would suggest you go with something else. It doesn't go very bright, and watching movies on the netbook spoils the experience in my opinion. Also - I am not sure how common this problem is, but my screen now does this strange thing where it goes completely white at certain viewing angles. Getting a display to actually come up takes some screen adjustment, which can be annoying as I sometimes have to settle for less-than-ideal viewing angles.

Connectivity: the NC10 has bluetooth and wireless b/g connectivity. The former works fine. The latter, however, is probably slightly dated nowadays, and is a big disadvantage if you're looking to buy this netbook new. There are noticeable differences in WiFi speeds when an b/g/n card is compared to a b/g card.

Keyboard and trackpad: the 95% of full-size keyboard was a major selling point for me. On the whole, it works really well. My only gripe in this area is that the right shift key is much smaller than expected, resulting in a lot of typos when I have hit the wrong key by mistake. I don't use the netbook constantly enough to get used to it all the time, so still find it fairly frustrating. The trackpad is tiny and unbearable to use, so I would definitely suggest a USB mouse if you can afford the space in your bag.

In summary: this does what it says on the tin and more. I woud highly recommend it, although the hardware may be getting slightly dated.