I hereby declare 2008 to be The Year of the Netbook! They’re like the Beanie Babies of the technology sector. Here’s Samsung’s offering, the NC10, for $449 on Buy.com if you pay with Paypal. The NC10 got Laptop.com’s editors’ choice award thanks to its “spacious keyboard and more than 6 hours of battery life” – so there you go.

Specs include a 10.2-inch display at 1024×600, Atom N270 CPU, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, six-cell battery, and XP Home – all in a 2.8-pound package. Not bad for $450.

Samsung NC10 Netbook [Buy.com]

It’s been relatively well documented already that the Samsung NC10 netbook boasts excellent battery life – well over six and a half hours via the included six-cell battery. Chippy over at UMPC Portal was able to do some battery-drain testing on the device and found that it was able to sip a paltry five watts at the bare minimum.

This could very well be attributed to good engineering and high-quality electronics and components. We’re still waiting for it to become available (any day now) but it’ll run $499 with a 10.2-inch screen, pretty useable keyboard, six-cell battery, XP Home, 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and a 1.6GHz Atom processor when it actually ships.

Samsung’s impending NC10 netbook is up for pre-order on two US online stores. The price is nice, too, at $480 – that’s less than we originally thought. The first store, PCNation, lists the netbook at $480.56 with free three-day shipping. The item’s status is backordered, saying it usually ships in 1-2 weeks.

The other site, Bottom Line Telecommunications, gives us some more detailed information, saying that it’s got a total of 750 units on order and that the ETA for all 750 is 10/23/2008 – a little under two weeks from now. That’s earlier than we though, too. The site is selling the NC10 for $480.21 with free ground shipping.

[via Engadget]