Samsung Go N310 Review

Introduction:

Not a stranger to the netbook market, Samsung has been producing a wide variety of choices that caters to the specific needs of consumers. Sometimes design and looks may not come into play for customers who are looking for something that is functional at its core. We’ve already checked out the clean cut looking Nokia Booklet 3G that makes the design of netbooks comparable to some high end notebooks that Apple throws out from their camp. The Samsung Go N310 forgoes an aesthetically pleasing exterior with one that is uniform all around to provide an experience that’ll hopefully be tolerable for web surfing on the go. Right now it’s AT&T’s first Samsung branded netbook to fall in line on their lineup – let’s see if the Samsung Go can really go and find a niche to make a name for itself.

Samsung throws the Go in your standard looking box along with the charger, battery, and instruction manual – nothing out of the ordinary or any extra goodies.

Design:

This netbook won’t win any awards for turning heads with its uniform bluish colored soft touch feeling material covering the entire unit. Luckily there’s a decent amount of color options to best fit your needs if the blue one doesn’t particularly suit your taste.  One good thing to mention about the material is that it doesn’t ever get too dirty or attract fingerprints; so it’ll always look clean. We’re not going to argue about Samsung’s decision, but the extremely large sized Samsung logo covers a good chunk of the back portion of the screen – it definitely screams your love for the Korean manufacturer, but it is overly exemplified. The Go N310 is a bit hefty looking when you pit it against the Nokia Booklet 3G side-by-side – luckily we find it to be solidly constructed all around and don’t question its durability. The Samsung Go has your usual set of connection options  - 3 USB ports, Ethernet, microphone & headphone jacks, 3 in 1 card slot (SD, SDHC, MMC), and  VGA port. In addition, it has a 1.3-megapixel camera with built-in microphone, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.1, and connection to AT&T’s 3G network via its quad-band UMTS modem.


LED screens seem to be the trend that most netbooks follow and the Samsung Go doesn’t deviate from that path. Its 10.1” WSVGA display has a glossy finish and packs your standard resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels which is crisp enough. As for brightness, the LED screen is visible in just about any lighting condition. From the looks of it, the display can be extended to 135 degrees – unfortunately the hinges connecting it to the body make us question its strength over time.


We’re fans of the adequately sized chicklet style keyboard that makes typing such a breeze. Keys are slightly larger than what’s found on the Nokia Booklet 3G and has the same tactile level. Anyone transitioning to this keyboard style from your traditional one will be pleasantly surprised how quickly you can type with little to no mistakes along the way. There’s slightly less room for your palms to sit which is partly due to the speaker taking up most of the top edge.  Finally, the touchpad sits dead center towards the bottom which is responsive when it comes to navigating.



There are numerous configurations you can select with the Samsung Go netbook, but the one we have uses an Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive, and came loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition.

Software and Performance:

Sure you can opt to go with a tried and true experience with Windows XP on the Samsung Go, but as we said, our unit came loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition out of the box. As with most netbooks, software offerings are slim pickings with your usual set of applications like Microsoft Works, MS Office Home & Student Edition with a 60 day trial, and McAfee Security Center as your anti-virus software choice for 30 days. Other than that, Samsung loads in a few programs and games that don’t leave anything worth mentioning to the imagination. Instead there are more tools to help optimize the experience with programs like Samsung’s Battery Life Extender. You may want to keep startup applications to a minimum to alleviate the stress off of the unit. Unfortunately with even disabling unwanted applications at startup, the overall experience we got out of the Samsung Go was nothing short of frustrating. Loading up applications and connecting to AT&T’s network was a timely process in itself – web surfing was painfully slow as well when it came to loading our site. Ironically enough, the Samsung Go just couldn’t perform the most basic of functions without being marred by slowdown at every turn – it just couldn’t “go”.

Unlike the easy SIM card access that’s found on the Nokia Booklet 3G, the slot is located in the most unusual place on the Samsung Go. You have to remove the 4-cell (4000 mAh) battery completely off the netbook to get access to the SIM slot. After installing our SIM, the AT&T Communication manager got us connected after some time. 

Netbooks are known for their focus on web surfing, but the Samsung Go just provides for an experience that’s far from enjoyable out of the box. Sure Internet Explorer may not be the ideal browser of choice, but it’s littered with choppy scrolling once we loaded up our site.  Although Wi-Fi connections makes for the fastest loading times, AT&T’s network made viewing YouTube videos a slow process – requiring many pauses and buffering times. Additionally, HD videos on YouTube froze up at times and it jumped from one frame to another – plenty of noticeable lag. The experience does not follow the mentality that netbooks are known to provide.

So maybe multimedia playback on a netbook may not be the most ideal thing to do, but the experience on the Samsung Go was just atrocious. We’d gather that Windows 7 could be the culprit between a lot of the choppy experience, but we were dismayed with the sluggish video playback. It implements HD Audio and SRS 3D Sound Effects, but of course, through the built-in speaker it sounds just like any speaker we’ve heard on other netbooks – you can go into the SRS Sound Settings and manually adjust some options to try to take advantage of better sound quality.

Would be owners should probably stick with Windows XP with the Samsung Go because we were unimpressed with its weak battery life with Windows 7 Starter Edition. At the bare most we got out of the 4-cell battery using it to check out some YouTube videos, it produced over 2 hours and 30 minutes of life before requiring a charge. When some of Samsung’s other netbooks, like the NC10 getting 4 hours of juice, we were thoroughly disappointed with the Go’s overall battery life. If this was one of the units running Windows XP with a 6-cell battery, it would have obtained an estimated 10 hour battery life according to Samsung. Nonetheless it still clearly falls behind some of the impressive numbers we’ve seen put out by the Nokia Booklet 3G.  With longevity being one of the main priorities of a netbook, the Samsung Go just doesn’t make the cut in that one category where it really needs to shine in order to be considered competitive.

Conclusion:

With so many GSM-based netbooks available, the Samsung Go falls flat in being passable for everyday use. We were really expecting to see this unit just go without any hiccups in performance, but its sluggish experience blatantly exposes the common problems some users run into – it’s all about the speed. Not only will you see it excruciatingly crawl to a near halt, but the battery life with Windows 7 Starter is a far outcry from what we’ve seen on similar netbooks. Priced at $199 with a 2-year agreement on AT&T ($449.99 full retail), it’s unimaginable to go with this one rather than something else that might make the experience a bit more joyful – ultimately it just won’t go unless you have a lot of patience.