Samsung N220

With the launch of its new ‘ Pine Trail’ platform late last year, it became clear that Intel wasn’t interested in upping the performance of its Atom processors too much. Instead, these new chips simply offered improved power consumption at the same 1.6GHz (or thereabouts) clock speed, plus a smaller size for more compact portables — helped in part by the incorporation of the graphics controller into the processor package.

The Samsung N220 is the first netbook we’ve seen to use the Pine Trail platform — a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, in this case. New chipset aside, there isn’t anything particularly novel about its specification and we’ve seen this 10.1” screen, 1Gb RAM, 250Gb combination many times before. Samsung does make some grand claims about battery life, though — “up to 12 hours” — but we’ll come onto that a little later.

Samsung seems to be on a roll with its recent netbooks and the N220 is another nice looking model. The shape and style is broadly similar to that the N140 we reviewed towards the end of last year, but this time the glossy lid is a deep red colour that blends into black around the edges — we like it a lot.

At 1.3kg, the N220 is at the heavier end of the scale for netbook weights, but, thanks to a gently rounded profile, it doesn’t look particularly bulky. Most of the case measures 38mm thick, but the back end has a large bulge for the bug 5900mAh battery. This protrudes from the underside rather than from behind the screen though, so it simply tilts the keyboard towards you rather than get in the way when you’re putting the N220 into a bag.

There’s nothing new in the way of ports, but Samsung has dropped in a new keyboard design and the N220 has one with low-profile, isolated keys (we just can’t bring ourselves to use the term ‘chiclet’…). The keys are a touch on the small side (around 14mm²), but they’re spaced far enough apart to make typing comfortable. The right-hand Shift key has been hit by the shrink ray, as has the cursor key cluster, but the Return, Backspace and left key column of Ctrl/Shift/Caps Lock/Tab are all generously proportioned.

The multi-touch touchpad is a good size and generally works well, but it’s a flush fit with the case and the lack of any tactile perimeter makes it easy to accidentally slip into the scrolling zones around the edges. The same thing can happen when using the same narrow, flush buttons, but perhaps it’s the kind of thing that you can subconsciously compensate for after using the N220 for a week or two.

There isn’t a great deal to say about the 10.1” LED-backlit screen — it has a matte finish and displays a crisp, bright image. Vertical viewing angles are a little narrow, but the hinges let the lid be tilted back far enough to cope with most netbook usage arrangements, no matter how unergonomic.

Samsung supplies the N220 with Windows 7 Starter Edition and this normally feels quite snappy on a netbook, but it felt a little laggy here. The 2D benchmark result was slower than that of other Atom N270 and N280 netbooks, but not by much and we suspect that swapping the single 1Gb SODIMM for a 2Gb module would help speed things up a little. Sadly, the GMA 3150 graphics chipset doesn’t offer anything new — there’s no HD video acceleration, it isn’t supported by Flash 10.1 (at least at the moment) and there’s no 3D performance to speak of.

Battery life doesn’t quite live up to Samsung’s claim of “up to 12 hours”, but it’s not far off — the N220 ran for almost 10 hours in BatteryEater Pro’s Light use test. This dropped to just over six hours in the Classic test, which suggests that the N220 will last for around eight hours of typical Wi-Fi-on use away from the mains.

At around £330 from online retailers like Play.com. the Samsung N220 isn’t bad value if you’re looking for a 10.1” netbook with a long battery life. The only complication is that both the Samsung N140 and Toshiba NB200 offer similar battery lives, and yet cost considerably less. Neither of those two models offer the Intel Atom N450 processor, but since this makes no difference to overall performance, that’s no great loss.

£330