It’s not quite a netbook, not quite an ultralight PC. Whatever it is, Samsung’s NC20 is a dazzling feat of engineering: an extremely usable 12-inch laptop with epic battery life, impressive specs and a downright mystifyingly affordable price tag.
The NC20 takes many of its under-the-hood cues from the netbook world, offering comparably restrained specs like 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive and, most eyebrow-raising, a VIA Nano U2250 CPU.
Seriously, a VIA? Though VIA has been touting the Nano as David to the Intel Atom’s Goliath, eschewing the now-standard Atom for a VIA still sounds like a downgrade. But in reality it’s the opposite. In our benchmarks, the NC20 outclassed every Atom-based laptop we’ve ever tested (most of which can’t make it through a round of benchmarks without crashing), and it even outscored our beloved Lenovo IdeaPad S10 by five percent on PCMark05.