A quick note about my feelings and observations after using my new Samsung N210 (white) netbook for a couple of hours during the last 2 days.

The new fellow was bought at danish netshop Proshop.dk (product page) for DKK 2551 (~342.75 EUR ~420.50 USD). Delivery was DKK 59 and took from order at thursday 17th until delivered monday 21st (danish mail is not to blame, I expected it to arrive friday, on stock and all but Proshop decided to wait until sunday 20th before processing the order).

Even though I’m a software junkie, I’m by no means a commercial hardware junkie (software is the enabler anyway, ya ‘now!). I don’t buy off-the-shelf  systems every other day, or have a job where I try out a horde of different netbooks/notebooks. Bear that in mind; these observations come from a newbie netbook user, with experience from larger more gfx capable laptops.

All of the below are under the overall judgement that says: I like this machine very much, it will indeed fellow me  in many a journey in the time to come.

List’o’Niceness

• battery time (just keeps on running, after 7.5 hour still 25% left)
• multitouch pad (pinch zoom, two-finger scroll (didn’t know I needed this!))
• light and easy to handle, battery acts as a kind of handle bar
• screen is crisp and clear
• soo silent (put ear to chassis to hear hdd, haven’t heard fan yet)
• very snappy feeling, in both Linux (Phoenix Hyperspace & Ubuntu 10.4 NE) and Windows 7 Starter (first encounter, but positively surprised)
• pgup/pgdn keys are just above cursor keys, nice!
• no heat

List’o’Annoyness

• no internal mobile broadband (slot present behind battery)
• all usb is in front = mobile broadband adapter is always annoying
• right shift key squeezed too much, keep hitting <> when shifting (might be DK keyboard specific)
• home/end keys with Fn qualifier requires getting used to (didn’t know I used these so much)
• alfa keys a bit offset to the left, keep writing 2 (argh…) 1 more than I need
• no space/mark between f4 & f5, f8 & f9
• caps lock indicator is hidden with other system leds (why isn’t it purple or something to stand out from power/wireless/hdd led?)
• num lock and scroll lock is indicated using osd from windows app, could be problematic in non standard environment
• no multitouch out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 10.4 (will be looking into this)

Oh, and of course, it needs a name! My N210 is named khandro, after a tibetian deity, meaning “cloud fairy” or “she who traverses the sky’.

Let the fairytales begin…