I purchased a Samsung NC10 a few months ago and continue to love it. My wife and I travel around the world every year for business and pleasure, and after she observed my NC10, as I used it on our last trip, she was sold on it and decided to have me order one for her. So I decided that we may as well try one of the newer versions. I chose the N120, mainly for the track pad and keyboard size, and the supposedly better speakers.
Well, it arrived yesterday (5/14/09), and after charging the battery and playing around with it for a few hours we decided to return it and buy another NC10. If I had never had an NC10 for comparison, maybe this would have been fine, but in comparing them side by side, I felt the N120 was slightly inferior.
The first thing that stood out to me (I am very picky about screens) is that the screen was not as easy to read as the matte screen of the NC10. I observed the same photos on each computer and felt the colors were not as accurate, nor as readable as the NC10's screen. It was bright enough, but the impression one would get from looking at both side by side is that the matte screen of the NC10 was overall a bit brighter and easier to view, especially off axis. When I brought the 2 netbooks outside to try them out on the back porch, it was over. The N120's glossy screen made it nearly impossible to see what was happening, as the sky and trees reflected back into the screen, while the NC10's matte screen was completely readable and usable. Also, as I continued to look at both, I kept thinking that the N120's screen was smaller somehow, so I took out a measuring tape and sure enough, the NC10's screen was 1/4" taller than the 120's, and they were both the same width. One thing a netbook is lacking in, is the screen height, and even though it was only a quarter of an inch, that was enough, combined with the inferior color rendition and the glossy screen, to put this back in the box and send it back to Amazon. Of course this is all subjective and ymmv as to what you like in a screen.
The positives of the N120 are that it's still as well constructed as the NC10, has a nicer look with the rounded corners and slightly thinner appearance, plus the slightly larger size of the keys and track pad are desirable. However my wife had no problems with my NC10's keyboard and she uses a travel mouse anyway so the track pad size was not an issue for her.
Further observations from the geeky tweak that I am:
I am always very concerned about wifi signal strength in my laptops because we travel so often and hotel wifi signals are many times so poor that every last bit of signal strength a laptop can provide is like gold to me. Nothing worse than sitting next to your buddy and he's surfing the net while your laptop can't even get a signal. So I though I better try some experiments while I had them both. I tried different positions around the house with both computers to see if either one had an advantage in wifi signal strength. Though this was certainly not a perfect scientific test, I noticed in every different location that the NC10 picked up at least 1 more local connection than the N120. The signal strength of each connection was either the same or one bar higher on the NC10. No biggie, but it was slightly in favor of the NC10.
Then I tried the speakers. Well, to my dismay, there was so little difference in quality between the 2 netbooks that I would have never chosen the N120 over the NC10 for sound alone, even if both were the same in every other way. Completely negligible. Yes, the N120 had a slightly richer bottom end, but believe me, the slight amount was indeed "slight". Both were also almost equal in volume output. That "subwoofer" they say is in the N120 is a joke. Please don't buy this expecting really great sound out of the supplied speakers. It's usable in a pinch for music and completely usable for Skype, but that's it. If you want good sound on the road, plug in headphones or buy one of those FoxL portable speakers on Amazon.
I hope any of this will be usable to those agonizing over which Samsung Netbook to purchase. I know I would have loved to have read someone's observations about these while I was struggling to figure out if I should just get another NC10, an N110, or an N120. Now I know. The screen is better on the NC10 and the pluses of the N120 are negated by the things I mentioned.
