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Samsung also joins world of Netbook

Sep 20, 2008 11:05

Samsung finally released its first Netbook called the NC10 in Korea with a U$690 price tag. Actually, this NC10 was discovered earlier in a WiBro (WiMAX) product launching ceremony which was presented by Korea Telecom in August.

Samsung has been quite quite about the Netbook which is very wired, if you know that Samsung released its first Origami portable PC, the Q1, which we use to call a UMPC. However, the Q1 series was discontinued after the Q1 Ultra, an upgraded model of the Q1 with QWERTY keyboard built-in.

Also, MID is a hot issue in the portable device market which replaced the UMPC sector but I haven't heard of any movement from Samsung in this area. It didn't attend the Intel Developers Forum either and didn't present any new MIDs while at IFA 2008 in Germany in August-September.

I'm sure Samsung is working on some new products in this area since it has merged the PC and mobile departments for greatter synergy in the mobile deviced area to share resources. (LG also did the same.)

Sasmsung is the PC market leader in Korea and a famous local brand with strong after-service support, so the NC10 will get good market response compared to previously released Netbooks from ASUS, MSI, Dell, etc., that is if the price comes out reasonable and seems so now.

However, I'm still concerned that this NC10 is not a house design or getting parts from Taiwanese and Chinese third-party manufacturers, like LG, MSI and many others are doing.

I heard one of the China makers is supplying the same Netbook model to MSI, Medion and more PC markers, all with the same look or a few modifications thrown in. They will just make the price differ based on the brand name. I assume those models will have similar box casings, too. Anyone can compare this?

This means we may have very limit unique Netbook models like the ASUS Eee PC and all others.

LG also gets its Netbooks from MSI and it surely looks familiar with the MSI Wind. Somehow this model's release date seems delayed even though LG announced its Netbook earlier than Samsung, which is expected to launch in September.

Here are brief specs of the Samsung NC10.

The size is similar to a B5-sized sheet of paper, with Intel Atom processor (N270), 10.2-inch LCD, 120GB HDD, 1GB DDR RAM, 1.3-megapixel Webcam, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, weight 1.3kg. Battery runs up to 8 hours on the extended cell.

Price tag of U$690 is quite attractive given its specs, though this is still a bit higher than other mid-branded Netbooks. What do you think, fellows? Do you guys really like this Netbook stuff?

I'm more into MIDs rather than Netbooks. The MID is a truely revolutionary device if it finds the right OS to go with. XP or Vista is too heavy and Linux isn't ready for the mass consumer market, especially the Korean market which isn't suitable or ready to adopt Linux due to many security and Internet issues. Same goes for the Mac OS. However, if you look at the iPod touch and iPhone, we are very much closed to a real MID. What I'd really want is a similar type of device running on a Microsoft OS to use without any concern for comparability issues in Korea. Am I expecting too much from Microsoft?

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