Word on the (Italian) street is that Samsung will be releasing the NC20 netbook sometime around February. It’ll be a netbook like the NC10 except it’ll have a nice, big 12.1-inch screen and it’ll swap out the Intel Atom processor for the new VIA nano CPU.
When I spoke with VIA reps at the Embedded Systems Conference here in Boston recently, they alluded to the fact that we’d be seeing plenty of netbooks coming out next year with their new processors. In case you hadn’t noticed, Samsung is a relatively large company, so throwing its weight behind VIA’s CPU for the next version of its already-popular netbook series is saying something.
Other features of the NC20 look to be fairly straightforward: 160GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, 1.3-megapixel web cam, and a 3.3-pound weight.
It’ll apparently retail for just under $650. The machine itself looks like a sexy slab of digital flatbread, if you ask me. Might be worth a closer look when we get more details.
[Notebook Italia via Engadget]
Aren’t Netbooks by definition 10″ and below ? This is a laptop.
Yeah, that’s the thing. Pretty soon all this stuff’s just gonna melt back together. The first company to put out a 13.3-inch “netbook” will definitely officially make the whole netbook/notebook distinction a moot point, if the 12.1-inch versions haven’t already.
Just 2-3 years ago, I paid about $3500 for a similar product from Samsung (the Q30, it had a slow ULV processor, an ipod-sized hard drive, a 12″ screen, and a weight below 1Kg but was a full-featured laptop). It was worth it to me because I value portability so much, but it was hardly plausible for most people. Great to see that this type of laptop is finally ready for the market.
I hope that with Windows 7’s low hardware requirements, it will be possible for many people to use (semi-)netbooks as their main computers. It would be another breakthrough in the democratization of laptops. IMO the last one was when mainstream laptops dropped below $1000.
This looks like a nice useable piece of kit, but I definitely calss it as a laptop not a netbook!
I agree that the screen size makes the Samsung NC20 on the borderline between netbook and notebook, but I’d say it qualifies as a netbook because of its low price, light weight, and lack of an optical drive; without the optical drive, it weighs much less and costs less.