Samsung N140

Samsung arrived a little late at the netbook party, but the NC10 it launched at the end of last year did at least have the good grace to combine smart design with long battery life. There was little else remarkable about it though, so we were eager to see what Samsung had up its sleeve with its latest model — the N140.

As it turns out, the Samsung N140 doesn’t look dramatically different from that model of a year ago and it has almost exactly the same dimensions. It is slightly lighter, but while the chassis has the same general shape, it has been refined a little and the silver strip that runs around the bottom half of the case looks a little less cheap.

Overall, it’s a very nice looking netbooks and the black model we were supplied with uses a pleasing combo of matte and glossy plastic.

There aren’t any large vents on the underside to worry about with the Samsung N140 on your lap, just a couple of narrow grilles. There’s also an easy-access panel for the memory slot, though you’ll have to remove the existing 1Gb SODIMM if you want to upgrade the memory.

Samsung reckons that the N140 is good for around 11 hours of use on battery power, but the supplied 6-cell 5900mAh battery doesn’t look big enough to be capable of such a feat. Only a narrow strip of the battery pokes from the base of the netbook and a couple of rubber feet let it keep the keyboard propped at a more comfortable angle. Other ‘all day’ netbooks we’ve reviewed have far bigger lumps of plastic poking from their rear ends, so we were eager to see how the N140 actually fared away from the mains — more on this later.

Lift the lid and little appears to have changed on the inside and judging by our old photos, the N140 seems to use the same keyboard as the NC10. Not that this is a bad thing — the NC10’s keyboard was excellent and the one on the N140 is just as good.

The trackpad is different, though — thank goodness. The NC10’s was too small and needed too many swipes to move the mouse pointer around, but there’s no such trouble with the N140. If we had to moan about something, it’s that pressing the mouse button exposes a sharp edge at the bottom of the trackpad and although this is merely a mild annoyance, it’s an odd lack of attention to detail for a netbook that’s otherwise so well designed.

The matte screen is crisp and clear, and has a wide range of brightness settings that even extend to turning the backlight off completely. The 10.1” diagonal and 1024 x 600 resolution mean that it’s not ideal for running all applications, but the same can obviously be said for any similarly equipped netbook.

So far, Samsung hasn’t really strayed far from the original NC10 in terms of design and specification, but  anyone hoping for some reinvention with the rest of the specification is going to be disappointed.

The N140 uses the same 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and Intel GMA950 graphics chipset as before, and so performance is on a par with just about every other netbook. Not that there’s much that can be done is this department, of course — other Atom processors offer almost no performance benefit and there’s little point in using NVDIA Ion graphics with so small a screen.

That said, the Samsung N140 is still up to playing HQ YouTube videos and other 480p content on mains power, but you’ll need to use the override shortcut key to force ‘High Performance’ mode for smooth playback on battery power.

Ah yes, battery power. Samsung makes a grand claim of 11 hours for the N140’s battery life, but laptops and netbooks seldom do so well in actual testing. Even so, a time of 7 hours in BatteryEater Pro Classic is still pretty impressive, as is 10 and a half hours in the Reader test. This means that the Samsung N140 is genuinely up to a full day’s use away from the mains — something that can’t be said for very many netbooks.