Sammy the Samsung NC10
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In May 2007, I wrote about wanting a cheap, distraction-free laptop to write on. I had contemplated getting a PDA and one of those awkward fold-out keyboards, but the Palm OS was just too ugly. More promisingly, I had heard rumours of this one laptop one child initiative, where poor children (like me?) would be given a small laptop that cost about $100. Alas, there was no evidence of this being available in PC World. All I wanted was a glorified typewriter with wifi — was that too much to ask for?
Evidently not. 20 Months later and the world has exploded with ultra-cheap ultra-small ‘netbooks’. It started with the Asus EeePC — released a few months after I bought my clunky 17″ laptop — and has continued ever since. The original EeePC only had a 7″ screen, a basic Linux OS and child-sized keyboard yet it seemed to fit a niche and became very popular. In the past, small laptops were super-expensive, designed for business people who were never off a plane. Now they were for anyone who wanted to write an email when they were out and about.
With each iteration, the laptops got slightly bigger, slightly more usable, and slightly more feature-packed; you also were no longer limited to using Linux, as Microsoft cobbled together a cheap version of the ageing XP. And so last night, with my Christmas money in my pocket, I bought a Samsung NC10. The specs are quite similar to my old laptop , but it is a lot smaller and the battery life is vastly superior (6 hours longer), so Moore’s law still just about applies.
Unlike a Mac, PC laptops never “just work”. You have to spend about five hours getting it into fully working order: peeling off stickers and uninstalling all the crapware that these things are loaded with. But it is actually quite pleasurable to type on this little keyboard and overall I am very happy with it.