Samsung NC20 - 12in Ultraportable Review

Battery Life

The NC20's battery has the same capacity as the NC10's at 5,200mAh, which gave us high hopes for how the NC20 would hold up out in the field. Thankfully, we weren’t wrong to expect a lot because the NC20 delivered on this front.

We ran a couple of battery drainage tests to give you an idea of how long the battery will last while running fairly typical workloads. The first is a best case scenario test with wireless disabled and screen brightness set to an acceptable level – we found 30 per cent to be usable – while the machine was left to drain the battery on the desktop.

The battery finally ran out of juice after an impressive six hours, 51 minutes – that gave us our absolute upper limit for the NC20’s battery performance.

Moving onto our second test, which is more indicative of the productivity tasks you’re likely to be doing on your laptop, we attached a USB 3G dongle and browsed the Internet, worked through the day’s email and worked on editing various Word documents until the battery ran out. In this test, the machine shut down after three hours, 34 minutes, which isn’t quite as impressive as the first showing – we were hoping for more, frankly.

With that said, it’s a respectable battery life – it’s longer-lasting than the MSI X-Slim X340 and the HP Pavilion dv2-1030ea especially, although both use much lower capacity batteries as standard. It will give you enough runtime to go out and about without having to be overly worried about how much time you’ve got before needing to find a plug socket again.

Final Thoughts

Samsung has continued the success it had with the excellent NC10 and applied it to a new, slightly bigger form factor with completely different guts inside. For one reason or another, Samsung isn’t actively pushing the NC20, which is something we find hard to comprehend because, generally speaking, it’s a brilliant little machine – especially when you factor in its sub-£375 asking price.

Not only does using it feel snappy and responsive, it also has decent battery life as well – it’s not the five or so hours we got from the NC10, but it’s better than the machines it’s really competing with. We’re referring to the Inspiron Mini 12 and Pavilion dv2-1030ea in particular here and, while we’re doing that, it’s worth comparing build quality as well – the NC20 is more akin to the dv2 than it is to Dell’s more direct competitor.

In that respect, the NC20 is a cut above most other netbooks when it comes to feel and quality, but it’s not without its problems. The keyboard, for example, is a bit of a disappointment and that’s nothing to do with how it feels – it’s more down to some rather suspect key placements that are difficult to comprehend. The Windows key in particular is on the wrong side of the spacebar and the tilde key is also in a strange location. The screen may also not be to many peoples’ tastes either – it’s very reflective, but still entirely useable although we much prefer the matte display on the NC10.

The NC20 isn’t a strong enough contender to be your sole computer, but if you’re looking for a machine that’s got enough juice to handle most common tasks you’d associate with an ultraportable notebook, then it’s a good choice. The higher resolution screen and bigger keyboard (despite the aforementioned drawbacks) combined with decent battery life means it’s a cut above most netbooks, although according to the new Windows licensing rules it can no longer really be classed as one – thankfully, its relatively snappy performance and feel are enough to make it feel like more than a netbook.

• Build Quality
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Ease of Use
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

Score Guide