General usage
General usageWhy no system setup page and comparison against a plethora of other netbooks? The simple answer is that it performs the same as the MSI Wind in all performance benchmarks. Take a look at our Atom CPU review to see how it stacks up - or not, as the case may be - against established notebook chips from Intel and AMD. What's clear is that Atom sacrifices significant horsepower to enable a thin-and-light form factor, and the accompanying GMA950 graphics are poor at rendering anything other than 2D.
Difficult to show in graphs, the N310, run on battery set to portable/laptop and equipped with the same base specification as an MSI Wind, appears to be a little smoother and faster when browsing the Internet and loading up basic applications. Adding in QuickTime clips encoded at 480p and both netbooks chug along, losing the fluidity that we've come to expect from even £300 mid-sized laptops.
The sound, whilst tinny, is also a little better than the Wind's, subjectively speaking, and Samsung's done a fine job at extracting the most performance from the technology under the plastic shell.
Run of the same portable/laptop power profile, the N310 returned a battery-life time of around 3.5 hours when browsing the 'net and some 2 hours and 28 minutes when playing back a full-screen Flash movie, via FLV Player, with screen set to mid-brightness (50 per cent) and WiFi/Bluetooth switched off. Both figures are better than the Wind's 3hr/2hr 10m performance, and the Samsung's larger (standard) four-cell battery pays dividends here.
