tomacintosh.com

When I first saw the deal O2 were offering I was very tempted to take them up on it right away. For £29 a month they were offering Mobile Broaband with a free Laptop. Now I didn’t need a Laptop as I already have my MacBook. But what I was interested in was a Netbook. I thought to myself, no I don’t need one, but I sure would like one (isn’t it always the same)

Anyway, I finally gave in, and after thrashing out a deal with O2, I got the price down to £22 a month. Add to that Quidco were offering £100 cashback if you ordered through their site, and it suddenly felt like a bargain!

I’ve always looked at Netbooks online and thought of them as being somewhat cheap looking. If only Apple would make a Netbook, I kept telling myself. With this deal though, I thought to myself, even if I don’t like it, I could always just sell it. I could then just use the Mobile Broadband Dongle on my MacBook, so I wouldn’t be losing out. Well as it turns out, I do like it, a lot.

Build Quality & Design

Ok so the build quality isn’t going to win any awards, but it is a very rugged little thing. There’s no flex in the casing when you pick it up, neither does it creak like many Laptops do. The screen hinge has a nice feel to it. I especially like the little rubber feet underneath, they really grip the machine to your desk. The edge of the unit sports a nice chrome effect bezel that flows around the front and sides, then makes another appearance on the hinges. The power button is accommodated in the hinge on the right hand side, similar to a new Apple Wireless Keyboard. When the unit is powered on this switch glows blue, a very nice effect that works great with the chrome. The underside of the unit is very basic, many vents and bumps, a memory access door, and the battery latch. The battery fills the void between the screen and the base, a nice touch, as I don’t very much like the Netbooks which have a great big gap there.

Screen & Storage

The 10.2″ screen is a joy to behold, it’s an LED backlit jobby with a 1024 x 600 resolution. Most websites I’ve visited fit the width fine. The screen is lovely and bright aswell, easily on par with my MacBooks, and actually surpases it in a brightly lit room (that hurt to say) Another area where it trumps my MacBook is viewing angle. The new Unibody MacBooks are known to have a terrible viewing angle compared to their big sister, the MacBook Pro. The Samsung easily beats my MacBook here, with an excellent viewing angle. Storage wise the model I got has a 160GB Hard Drive, this is a lot of storage for a Netbook, more than a MacBook Air. I don’t mind the fact it isn’t an SSD either!

Connectivity & WiFi

There’s a fair few options here for you to connect peripherals. The left side of the machine houses the Charger point, Ethernet port, and two USB 2.0 ports (from back to front) On the right hand side we have VGA out, single USB 2.0 port, Microphone, and finally Headphones (again back to front). At the front there’s an SD Card slot, and a bunch of blue LED status lights. I’ve found the SD reader to be very handy, the 16GB SDHC card I use for my Kodak Zi6 is picked up effortlessly. I haven’t had any problems using the WiFi either, it may only be G-spec, but it offers great range and good speed.

Keyboard & Trackpad

The keyboard is very good for a device of this size, Samsung state it’s 93% full size. All I know is it’s nice enough to type on and has good tactile feedback. One thing that catches me out is the ‘A’ key, it isn’t as far in from the left as my MacBook so I’m constantly hitting ‘S’ instead! Onto the trackpad, this is possibly the only major gripe with the unit. Size wise it just isn’t big enough. There are virtual scroll bars on the vertical and horizontal axis to aid with browsing. The trouble with this is, it leaves very little room left to navigate the cursor. I found a great little hack for this though. It enables two-finger scrolling, thus you can disable the virtual scroll bars, freeing up precious trackpad space!

Battery Life

The Sammy comes with a 6-cell battery as standard. Most Netbooks make you fork out extra for one of these. With a full charge expect a class topping 6 hours of battery life. Now I’m not saying you’ll get 6 hours of watching a Movie, or browsing YouTube, but for general Web Browsing, Email, Blog posting etc, it easily makes it over 5 hours for me.

Performance

Spec wise this Netbook uses the same sort of hardware that many on the market today do. That is, an Intel Atom 1.6GHz N270 Processor with Intel 945GSE Integrated Graphics. While the GPU isn’t very good, this machine is still nippy enough for most multimedia needs. Watching Standard Def movies or streaming YouTube videos is pretty effortless. I upgraded the 1GB PC6400 RAM module in mine to a 2GB version from Play.com, only cost £14.49 and was well worth it. I was actually surprised when I tried running a 720p trailer from the Apple website, it dropped a few frames here and there, but was still watchable. Lower it down to 480p and it’s absolutely fine. One thing that bugs me though is the tearing, quite noticeable with HD movies or if you run a game. I guess after all’s said and done, these are not Gaming/HD machines. Look out for my Podcast when I launch it later this week, first episode is this very machine running Half-Life 2!

Conclusion

Overall I am delighted with this Netbook. On the way to work in the morning it’s the type of device you can just quickly throw it in your bag. I can see myself taking it to work with me nearly everyday because it’s so light and convienient. The excellent battery life means you barely have to worry about carrying a charger around with you. To top it all off you also get a 1.3MP webcam, which seems of reasonable quality, built in stereo speakers, and a microphone. The speakers aren’t the loudest I’ve ever heard, but they do the job. If you’re in the market for a Netbook then you’d do a lot worse than pick up a Samsung NC10.

Since the App Store opened there’s been a flurry of games added every single day. I’m sure you would all agree, many games are cheap and nasty. Now I’m not disrespecting any particular developer out there, because I know how hard it is to code these apps. But a lot are merely tech demos showing what the iPhone is capable of, without any real depth to their gameplay. Prices have been constantly falling since the store opened, can anyone remember paying £5.99 for Super Monkey Ball? I can.

Up steps Chop Sushi, I bought this game towards the end of January, and basically spent the whole of February playing it! Whenever you boot up the game it gives you the option of whether or not to enable sound, I find this a very nice touch, especially if you fancy listening to your own tunes while playing, instead of the ingame music. What immediately hits you once the game has loaded is it’s excellent presentation, menu’s are slick, colourful and well laid out.

The Game Modes consist of ‘Adventure’ ‘Quick Battle’ and ‘Challenges’. Obviously Adventure is the main quest which takes you to a variety of islands where you battle against odd looking characters. By beating them, you release them of their Demons, and they become Shop keepers who will sell you Challenges and Recipes. You use Fish as the games currency. You can either catch your own fish (at start of every island) or you can earn Fish ingame by matching three or more in a row. Challenges can be bought using Fish, and come in Easy, Medium or Hard difficulties. Challenges involve matching all the Sushi onscreen in a predetermined amount of moves.

Onto the main game then, it works by matching three or more of a kind. But the way you match the Sushi is a bit strange to get use to at first. When I first started I expected it to be along the lines of Bejeweled, merely swapping pieces around. It’s a bit tougher than that, and requires a lot more careful planning if you are to pull off combos to earn extra turns.

Take the picture above, I can line up four green blobs (Wasabi’s) by picking up the stray one and sliding my finger to the right, this sends it all the way to the end of the row, and shuffles everything else to the left. Because I made a line of four, I automatically get given another go, which is very handy! Whenever you line up three or more Wasabi it takes health power off your opponent. You win the match when your opponents health is depleted, likewise, you lose if he clears your health. The orange coloured Fugu build up your experience points, the more you collect, the higher the experience multiplier is at the end of each match. You may notice from the screenshots there are Stones mixed in with everything else. These cannot be matched, but once you run out of moves, instead of the game ending, these Stones all crack open revealing more Sushi, Fish, Fugu or Wasabi!

So why do we need the Sushi? Well, once you’ve won a couple of matches you slowly get introduced to Recipes. These consist of Boosts, Traps and Specials. If you activate a Boost ingame, it has a negative effect on your opponent. If you activate a Trap, it has a negative effect on you. You activate the Recipes by matching up Sushi in the order and amount shown on the tabs to the left of the screen. Sometimes you will find there is no other move left but to activate a Trap, and this puts you out of luck!

Graphically the game is a joy to behold, excellent artwork is backed up by great character design and nice animation. Sound wise the game is very quirky, personally I find the battle music to be very catchy and am sometimes left with it stuck in my head all night. It’s very much like the soundtrack to a Bruce Lee film!

Overall there enough lasting appeal to make this game well worth the £1.79 asking price. Compared to many games on the App Store, this is packed full of enough Levels and Challenges to keep you occupied for weeks to come. This is easily one of the best puzzlers on the iPhone, so I am awarding  it my App of the month award for February, go buy it! [iTunes Link]

If you would like to ask anything about the game that I may not have fully covered in the review, don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.