Samsung N150 review

The lid didn't flex too much under pressure but the screen within displayed plenty of desktop distortion and we experienced some creaking. The wrist rest was little better, bending when light pressure was applied.

It's not much of a looker, either: the majority of the chassis is crafted from cheap, plain plastic, and the only real concessions to style are the burnt orange strip around the base and the shiny lid which, we noticed, quickly gathered fingerprints. Three USB ports, a VGA output and a card reader are scattered around the exterior.

We've been accustomed to netbooks running on the ubiquitous Intel Atom processor, but Samsung has used a new version of the chip in its latest machine. The Atom N450 runs at 1.6GHz and follows the lead set by Intel's more powerful Core i3 and i5 parts by including an integrated GPU within the chip, albeit on a separate die.

The new processor, though, hardly kept up with older Atom chips: its score of 0.32 in our benchmarks is around 20 per cent slower than we'd expect from the average netbook and will limit the N150 to the most basic of tasks. That integrated GPU, meanwhile, is a lowly Intel GMA 3150, won't handle games or HD video, and will look even more outdated with the forthcoming arrival of Nvidia's ION 2.