The NF310 is really a bold departure from your traditional netbook. With the charcoal gray lid closed, you can see the outline of a wave along the sides. Once open, the curve creates a shallow well on the silver deck where the keyboard sits. This bump would make the 1.2-inch thick technique a little bulky, however the rounded corners and tapered edges aid give the NF310 an air of sleekness. The chunkier back half and slightly jutting battery make the 2.8-pound netbook snug to carry one-handed. The lid gives off a metallic impression, however the plastic coating collects smudges very easily and leaves it looking messy. We wish Samsung would offer you far more color possibilities. Underneath the lid, a glossy plastic bezel with a dotted pattern surrounds the display. The pattern is cool, however the bezel is really a little larger than we'd like.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The island-style keyboard capabilities keys with flat surfaces and a bit of area in between each important. Due to the gray/silver metallic finish of the situation, the keyboard in fact looks a lot like a MacBook keyboard, even though it has a lot more flex to it since the base is made of plastic instead of aluminum. The touchpad is great and broad. Actually, it is a bit wider compared to room bar, which is uncommon - although to be fair, the space bar is actually a minor smaller on this netbook than on several other mini-laptops I've employed. There's a nice texture towards the touchpad which helps make sliding quite straightforward. It also supports multitouch gestures including pinch-to-zoom or making use of two fingers to scroll.
Display and Audio
You do not typically uncover a 1366 x 768-pixel display on a netbook, which makes the Samsung NF310 feel much more like a normal laptop computer when surfing the web, working on documents, and performing other tasks. It just feels less claustrophobic. The 10.1-inch matte display has broad viewing angles, too, plus rich, deep colours. The lack of gloss means no reflections and some limited sunlight visibility. The two speakers sitting above the keyboard supplied fantastic audio, specifically for the netbook. Thanks to SRS Premium Sound drivers, we have been ready to hear the distinct bass line in Superchick's "One Girl Revolution" and rock out to Metallica's "Enter Sandman" on just 50 percent volume. Even when watching The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror, we didn't have to max out the volume to hear it clearly in a space with low-level background noise.
Performance
The 250GB, 5,400rpm hard drive completed the Transfer Test in 4 minutes and 9 seconds for any rate of 20.4MBps. The common netbook is often a small slower (19.0), but the Mini 5103 (21.5), Aspire 1 D255 (23.7), and the Eee PC 1015PEM (27.5) are all quicker. Even now, the NF310 was able to boot into Windows 7 Starter Edition in just 45 seconds, way under the netbook regular (63) and the Mini 5103 (53). The system also proved speedy inside the video clip transcoding department, taking just 3 minutes and 50 seconds to convert a 114MB MPEG file to AVI using Oxelon Media Converter. This is two minutes less than the regular netbook and a couple of seconds more rapidly compared to Eee PC 1015PEM (3:56).
