back to article Samsung N350 dual-core netbook

The debate as to whether netbooks are evolving fast enough rages on. Some say manufacturers are guilty of laziness by continuing to churn out similar models, while others argue that there’s simply no need for netbooks to evolve like standard laptops and that more attention should be put into making them cheaper. Samsung N350 …


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  1. David Hicks

    Dual core good

    Battery life - bad but not terrible

    Hard drive instead of solid-state storage - lame.

    Apart from the new processor, things really haven't progressed much since the eee901, nor have the prices dropped.

    I don't care if you're in the "make 'em cheaper" or the "make 'em faster" camp, some real progress on either of those fronts would be good!

  2. Anonymous Coward


    Having used an EeePC 1000 for a couple of years now I am certain that the most important feature in machines of this class is battery life. Processing power, memory etc. are more than adequate for typical netbook purposes. So the N350 is a mistake : for £350 I would expect significantly higher battery life, a higher res screen and a DVD drive. I wouldn't pay more than £200 for it as it stands.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward


      A DVD drive in a netbook? That would be a first, right?

  3. WonkoTheSane

    Not for me.

    Would rather have a bigger battery & Nvidia ION/Tegra graphics.

  4. Peter Bond


    are those Broadcom wireless cards more or less Linux compliant than the Realtek cards Samsung uses in most of its other netbooks? Guessing they can't be any worse.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward


    Any chance of firing it up with a bootable USB of the latest Ubuntu to see if it is fully functional out of the box, or whether we'd need to go and find any drivers for it?

    1. Steve Adams


      yes please - that would be much appreciated.

      Both Netbook and desktop please :-)

  6. Steve Adams


    Why have the netbook manufacturers deserted SSDs?

    I would love something like this (better battery though) and would prefer just 20GB SSD than 250GB disk.

    I don't want to carry around all that info/data/entertainment on a netbook - I have no need for it (it's just more to manage/lose)

    I appreciate others might want more capacity, that's OK I've no problem with that :-)

    Why are there no new(ish) netbooks which come without Windows and with an SSD?

    Anyone know?

    Not enough demand for such?

    Think i'll wait for an android tablet instead :-(

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Jobs Horns

      The market...

      Is there, at least from my experience. Seems manufacturers are too busy creating tablets, that have half the spec, and they charge twice as much for (and are basically scaled "smart"phones)

      Something like the eee 901 (with one SSD, not 4+16 or 8) a little slimmer would be perfect, thank you.

  7. bob_bob

    Make 'em cheaper

    The Netbook was meant to represent the gateway to sub £200 computing (or at least net access) so to my mind any offering which can't come close to that price point is not a netbook, just an underpowered Laptop.

    Seconded on battery life, the biggest problem with my Acer Aspire A110 is that battery life is a poor.

  8. Lottie


    So now this is out, will eBay be flooded with cheap nearly new N230s?

    Strikes me though, that for what I (and I assume many others) use a netbook for, this product doesn't rally hit the mark.

    For me, my old pink Aspire One is the gold standard: Removable battery so I can either install a higher capacity one, or take a fully charged spare if I really need to. SSD storage. What's the point of a laptop that's small and light enough to just bung in a bag and take wherever if its internals aren't as robust as they ought to be? Also, SSD takes much less power to run.

    Lovely looking piece of kit, but I fear it may be a housebound computer.

  9. ZimboKraut


    I have to admit, initially I though, dual core atom would a real treat, but in reality, the apps that are normally used on a netbook, don't make use of it.

    far better is more RAM, and I can say, it makes a huge difference. also, being able to run 64bit os on the atom would make sense.

    but apart from that the only thing that is better than a long battery life, is even longer battery life.

    my suggestion to those manufacturers and netbook designers out there:

    why not implement a buffering capacitor, that lasts mayby three to five mintes, so that a battery can easily be swapped without shutting down, or hybernating the netbook.

    But I suspect, this would run contrary to the marketing psychop.. uh... psycologist, who would argue, that this might give the impression of the battery life being poor and it just being a cheap copout... well,

    two decent six or ninecell batteries plus the capacitor could potentially bring the expectancy into a twenty hour window....

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward


    are they serious , £349 for a crappy Intel® Atom™ Processor N550 Launch Date Q3' 2010

    when Intel Corp has rolled out the first six members of a new line of system-in-package products announced in September that include Atom and Altera FPGA die. ?

    the so called Stellarton platform.

    The E600C series aims to help embedded designers speed Atom-based chips to market. The FPGA blocks let engineers customize the devices for whatever interfaces or unique features their system requires.

    The high–end chip uses a 1.3 GHz Atom with a 400 MHz graphics block consuming 3.6W and costing $106. The low-end device runs at 600 MHz with a 320 MHz graphics block, consumes 2.7W and costs $61.

    The Altera FPGAs inside the 37.5mm2 package use more than 60,000 logic elements and can support six high-speed transceivers using more than 350 I/O pins. The transceivers can run at up to 3.125 Gbits/s or support LVDS links with serdes at 840 Mbits/s.

    Intel formally announced its Tunnel Creek products now called the Atom E6xx series. The SoCs merge an Atom core with display, memory and graphics controllers as well as a 4x PCI Express Gen 1 interconnect.

    Nine versions of the chip will range from high-end devices consuming 3.9W at 1.6 GHz and low end versions consuming 2.7W at 600 MHz. The chips will be in volume production in November.


    Board maker Kontron has E600C-based prototype boards available now, with full production beginning in the second quarter of 2011.

    what does that mean , it means you could get a high profile H.264 Encoder/decoder and the like inserted/loaded into these FPGA at the OEM and be happy to get full hardware offload of any codec given a FPGA file were made available to you to load up etc....

  11. Robert Carnegie Silver badge


    I think we're going to see speech recognition in general use once people get the idea - with keyboard for the difficult parts, maybe. It's come as standard since Windows Vista, and it's pretty smart. But I don't think your basic Atom processor is good enough to do the job satisfactorily. Dual core - well, I don't know how that will alter the performance for that mode of use. Maybe dedicate one core to speech input, and the other to running everything else.

    1 GB RAM is stupidly small nowadays. Sure, Atoms are limited to 2 GB architecturally, but if you're stepping up the processor, then you may as well pay up for the larger memory, also.

    An SSD and longer battery life makes sense. That should appear as an option if you can't upgrade it yourself - if the machine is as hard to undress as you're telling us. Otherwise, I suppose you can use a large SD card with ReadyBoost in the slot provided.

  12. Michael Jennings

    You are paying a huge premium for dual core

    You can buy a perfectly nice single come netbook based on the N450 or N455 CPU for £199 if you shop around. The dual core N550 options seem to start around the £300 mark.

    Either Intel has production issues with the dual core parts, or somebody is taking the piss.

  13. resudaed

    Acer D255

    I paid < £280 for a D255

    N550 Dual Core, 1GB, 250GB SATA and a 6 cell Battery (8 hours+), LED Backlight. The only downside is that it looks like a complete dismantle to get to the single RAM slot.

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