The Samsung NF310 is a good netbook for the price and can make life difficult for its competitors.

Visual Appearance

It has two prominent visual aspects, the frame is made from plastic, but the gray metal on the lid and the palmrest may deceive you into thinking that it is built mostly from metal and secondly, the chrome trim of the laptop forms a wave that starts in the middle of the chassis and ends in the bulge of the screen hinges. In short, the computer looks nice and appears to be well-built.

The 10.1-inch display is surrounded by a glossy black frame, which can easily attract fingerprints. Those who want to keep their netbooks clean should have plenty of patience and of course, a clean cloth.

The input devices are typical, keyboard and touchpad: The keyboard has a classic layout and typing is comfortable, the left Alt button is reduced in size to extend the spacebar for a few millimeters. The touchpad may give you a metallic sensation and consisted of a smooth surface with a dimension of 7.3 x 3.8 cm. The dimension is 27×18, 7×3 cm and about 1.3 kg in weight.

Audio and Video

Because it is a notebook, you should expect better than average audio and video performance, even so Samsung NF310 has something unique. Its display has a native resolution of 1366×768 pixels, with excellent contrast, brightness, color depth and viewing angles. The material used for the display is also not causing the annoying light reflections problem.

The audio is also quite nice, it can reproduce sound accurately and at high volume the sound quality is decent.

Hardware and Performance

The processor is an Intel Atom N550 1.5 GHz, supported by 1 GB of RAM and Intel GMA 3150 with shared memory as the graphic processing unit.

The operating system uses Windows 7 Starter Edition installed in a 250 GB 5,400 rpm SATA hard drive. The netbook has the onboard 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 + EDR, and also an integrated webcam for video conferencing.

The overall performance of Samsung NF130 is good: using it to surf the Net and run office application will not cause a problem, since the performance index is slightly above the average. It is only appropriate for very casual gaming, as the 3DMark06 score is recorded to be only around 145 points.

Just like other latest netbooks on the market, Samsung offers a balanced hardware, but it is mostly useful for typical office uses. It has some interfaces: on the back left is the power socket, VGA output and a USB port, while on the other side, you’ll find two USB ports, card reader, the Ethernet port and a Kensington Lock.

Fast Start Feature

The Samsung NF130 uses a specialized software developed by Samsung for its laptops, called Fast Star, as the name suggests, it allows you to put it on stand-by, only by closing the lid and reactivate it almost instantly after reopening the lid.

Battery

The six-cell battery allows the netbook to run for 6 hours and 30 minutes, which is acceptable and can be considered as average in this segment. However, if you need netbooks with longer battery life, you can find other models in the market.

The Samsung NF130 is essentially a well-designed netbook and excellent display quality. The battery life is not exceptional, but for the price, you shouldn’t ask for more.

Pros:

Attractive design and excellent display

Cons:

Fingerprint magnet