Unboxed – Toshiba NB200 vs Samsung N120

A pair of fledgling netbooks came to the Stuff office today, yapping for attention. Such is our weakness for the little beggars, we invited the pair – Toshiba’s NB200 (above left) and Samsung’s N120 (above right) – in for an unboxing.

The more interesting is the NB200 (£320), Tosh’s 10in follow-up to the 8.9in NB100. There’s no doubt it’s a looker, mixing silver highlights with a MacBook-style ‘tiled’ keyboard. But its battery still juts out awkwardly from the back – why not just move the screen back and make the keyboard bigger, eh Tosh?

Still, it’s an improvement in most other ways – there’s more memory (1GB rather than 512MB), the screen is still great, and one of the three USB ports has Tosh’s ‘Sleep and Charge’, which lets you charge peripherals even when it’s powered down. Handy.

Looking like its sneaked out of an Eee PC factory, Samsung’s N120 (£320) actually has a 12in screen – making it more of a low-end laptop than netbook.

Elsewhere its specs (160GB hard-drive, 1.6Ghz processor) are very similar to the NB200, although it’s claiming a 10 hour battery life (one more hour than the NB200). As they’ve only just turned up, this is one thing we haven’t tested – but the kettle’s boiling and our stopwatch has started.