Gadgetrepublic.com - Gadget Review

^{The NB30 has quite a nice swirly patterned cover with good grip}

Samsung's NB30 netbook is being marketed as an education-focused netbook. To be perfectly honest, there is no reason why I would pick the NB30 over another netbook for educational purposes but I would favour this netbook if I wanted children, teenagers or clumsy adults to use it because it is a netbook for the hard-knock life. Literally.

Before you even power up the NB30 you'll see that the outer cover has a nice swirly pattern and this is designed to give a good grip, plus it seems to take messy handprints a little better than a glossy cover.

^{A good-sized keyboard with smooth, flat keys}

Nine times out of 10, teens will not lift their netbook up carefully and gently in their arms, they'll grab it by the lid (so do I!) and the NB30 endures this rough and tumble in more ways than one.

NB30 is a rugged, durable netbook

The built-in HDD Shock Protection from Samsung does the job: you can drop it on its head and the hard drive will be fine. There's a 3D accelerometer inside the NB30 (some Toshiba models have this, too) and once you have this feature enabled it detects motion and can tell if it is in freefall and does this incredibly clever little thing called HDD head unloading that apparently decreases the risk of disk damage.

But there's more! The hard drive itself is composed of shock absorption material that can take more knocks than the average netbook.

Moving away from the touch exterior, a few little things that bugged me: the clasp for opening the netbook is not as easy to pry open as I would have thought and instead of an 'on' button there is a slider across the outside that I kept mistaking as a clasp for popping the blasted thing open.

How and ever, the keyboard is a beauty. Nicely flattened and slightly rounded keys and a mousepad thankfully that is not too big: many other manufactures don't realise this but the bigger the mousepad the more the user accidentally brushed off it and the cursor hops to another position onscreen. Incredibly annoying.

All the standard netbook features

The insides of the Samsung NB30 are standard-issue netbook bits and bobs: an Intel Atom processor, 1 gig of memory, 10.1-inch screen, 160GB hard drive and Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth.

_{The SD slot is handy for uploading your photos}

One of the extras includes a SD card slot - great for fast transfer of your digital-camera snaps or other data.

One thing I didn't like about the NB30 was that it came with Windows 7 Starter. I've gotten used to Home Premium, found that it worked quite well on a 1-gig netbook and didn't slow it down at all so I was wishing that I had all the extra features, including the dynamic wallpaper and personalisation features but nevermind, Starter is still Windows 7 and fairly robust.

Chargeable USB feature is indispensable

This netbook, of course, has other bits, including the webcam, which is quite clear in terms of resolution and quality, and unbeknownst to me it has the chargeable USB feature that I thought only Toshiba had - you can charge devices on this via USB even when it is in standby mode, hibernation or powered off.

Conclusion

If you want something for lectures, meetings, surfing the web and a bit of media on the side and one of your main requirements is durability, then go for this.

The NB30 is one of the most feature-packed, rugged and cost-conscious netbooks on the market.

Price From €329 (including VAT)

Available All good computing stores nationwide

By Marie Boran