Customer Reviews

Samsung N130-13B 10.1-Inch Slate Blue Netbook - Up to 6.2 Hours of Battery Life

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Purchased this netbook from Amazon Monday evening and received it on Thursday; fast shipping Amazon. This is a super netbook for $299.99. Color is matte blue and white which shows no fingerprints. Actually like the color better than I thought I would. Build quality is solid as you would expect from Samsung. Screen is matte not glossy which I also like. Very little bloatware to remove. I bought this for my wife who travels and has to give powerpoint presentations. Needless to say she loves this little thing. It will certainly make her travel easier, as this netbook is so small and light(2.8 Lbs). It is a simple netbook; doesn't come with all the bells and whistles, like bluetooth, 1.3 camera, etc. The wifi card found my AT&T Uverse device quickly, so I was on the internet immediately. Battery life is as advertised; it took me about 6 hours to run it down from initial full charge. Wife likes the touchpad, too; I use the usb mouse. If you want a solid, simple netbook with middle of the road battery life, you will like this little gem.
Out of the box, fully charge the battery(light on left front edge of netbook will go from orange to green when fully charged). Next boot up and it will lead you quickly through windows XP installation. Then configure it with programs like you want it. Then enjoy. It is a great product and a steal at this price.

I had been looking at the "netbook" market for a while and with all the different brands and sizes out there it took me a while. My main factors were price, size (keyboard and screen), and battery life. I feel that a lot of the netbooks out there are just cheap looking, like a little kids toy almost. The N130 is solid, yet light, boasts a 90%ish sized keyboard (works great with my big fingers) and has a 5/5 hours of battery life, real world. It comes with Windows 7 Started Edition which is great but my only complaint with Started is you can't change the desktop background... How dumb is that? Video isn't the greatest on here either, YouTube is OK, but video files are slightly choppy especially at full screen. But hey this is a netbook and is built for browsing the web, and for that it is amazing. I was considering buying a full size notebook and decided on this netbook and I couldn't be happier. It's a perfect fit at a perfect price.

On a side note, I got mine running Mac OSX and man does it fly with OSX installed. Definitely worth it if you're tech savvy enough.

Would buy it again and recommend to a friend. Strengths are portablility, easy wireless connection, good keyboard, USB connections, scrolling touchpad, and price. Weaknesses are horrible weak speaker and a battery life of only about 4 hours with screen brightness set to a comfortable level. All netbooks share the limitations of small screen size, limited memory, and lack of optical drive. If those factors are not acceptable, size up to a low end light weight laptop. I can live with them to gain the portabliliy and price benefits. Among netbooks I bought this one due to strong reviews from many sources regarding Samsung quality and performance and, among the Samsung models, the lowest price. I'm happy with it and use earphones.

*Review of the N130 with Windows Starter 7*

Per other reviewer, it's true, you cannot officially change the desktop background on Windows 7 Starter. There are some workarounds on the 'net. I have not tried them, though.

Another reviewer said this laptop has bluetooth. That is false; check the specs at samsung's website. It does have a VGA output and 3XUSB 2.0.

Screen is an annoying 1024X600 but that is pretty common in these. There is, with new drivers from Samsung, a way to cheat out at 1024X768. It's still 600 high but with compressing some pixels together you can see more of what's going on. It looks too silly to normally use but is good if you need to access a large dialog box for an application. Screen is crisp.

Battery life is nice. I've only had this two days but would say its estimate of 5 hours or so is pretty fair when surfing the net wirelessly. 5.8 is probably stretching it.

Of note it seems that the screen can be made really bright--even on battery. I've often lamented my other laptop's unwillingness to go bright to plugged-in levels on battery (yes, it eats more power), but this goes sharp.

Keyboard is decent. My hands are normal man size (?) but I'm getting used to it. Backspace could be larger.

Single speaker is pretty terrible. Not loud, don't think about listening to music on it. It has a headphone jack, though.

Restore feature is nice addition. I have not tried it out, though.

This gets three stars because it is capital S.L.O.W. Now, granted apparently these 1.6 ghz CPUs are more like a Celeron of half the mhz or a bit more, but I just found in general using this on Windows Starter 7 to be unenjoyable. Everything lags. Loading Internet Explorer takes too long. Google Chrome takes too long. Opening new tabs within the browser is quick but then loading each one is slow. Scrolling skips from time to time as something else thinks about loading. Go into control panel and watch the progress bar. Literally everything entails either a progress bar or that interminable spinning blue circle because nothing is quick, nothing is snappy. I know this isn't a gaming PC. I haven't used enough other netbooks to note whether this is slower. My guess is it probably isn't, but I am actually returning mine after just a couple of days. No way I can tolerate this for a couple of years. Youtube works. Youtube HD absolutely not (single digit frame rate).

Here is my advice: if you do a lot of travelling and need small size and battery life this is probably a good bet. Just realize its performance is not great. It's amazing what can be built into something so small for the cost, but still. If you are looking for a computer to kick around the house and live between the kitchen and the den spend an extra $100 and get an entry-level laptop. It will obliterate this in terms of performance. Larger screen, more HD space, magnitudes (literally) more power and memory.

I had the black version of this exact model.

Liked the matte finish - most netbooks have shiny frame around screen and often shiny plastic around keyboard and fingerprint-attracting exterior. Liked the low fan noise - some netbooks are like a miniature chainsaw in a quiet room. The keys have nice feel and have good tactile feedback.

Had to return it to store because I couldn't type reliably on the keyboard.

The small key size wasn't the issue.

Problem was that I kept hitting the "=" key instead of the Backspace key.

I compared it side-by-side with other netbooks in the store and discovered that - in order to make the keys very slightly larger than the keys on other netbooks - Samsung made some of the keys a lot smaller, including the Backspace key.

With standard keyboards - and most netbooks - the left edge of the backspace key is centered above the "}]" key.

On this machine, the Backspace key is not centered, it is quite a bit over to the right. The keys in the top row of the keyboard are not centered over the next row down - as with most netbooks, notebooks, and full-size keyboards.

Same issue with other normally big keys - but the Backspace key was the big problem for me.

If you don't use the backspace key, or if you use only this netbook and not other keyboards (so you don't have to switch keyboards all the time) - then this is a fine unit.

Love this netbook. Had to return the first one I got because it had a sound problem. Don't like the white interior as much as my original slate blue one but overall its great. Much faster after I removed McAffee and installed AVG free. Now I need an external optical drive.

I got this netbook for under 300 dollars and for the price, it was worth it.

Pros: The finish prevents ugly fingerprints, it runs well, it's fast to set up, it's easy to upgrade memory to 2GB, and it's battery life (5hrs+...very rare to find it at the price I got it for). Windows XP isn't too bad but I plan to upgrade to Windows 7.

Cons: Sound and the webcam is kinda choppy.

The sound can be fixed, however, with a pair of headphones or desktop speakers and the monitor is set at a comfortable level. For those with big hands, the keyboard may take some getting used to but it's no problem. Considering I'm using this netbook to surf the web, stay in touch with people, type up documents, and do basic Microsoft office apps, it is just what I need at a very portable package. Overall a good buy.

I spent a couple of weeks researching netbooks and trying them out in stores. My search narrowed it down to this one or the N140. I chose the N130 because it was a hundred bucks cheaper. The N140 however has longer battery life and would have been a good choice as well. High on my list was a nonreflective screen which most netbooks don't have, non finger print finish, and good battery life. The N130 has a nice keyboard and decent battery life of about 5 hours. I installed 2 gigs of ram immediately and removed most of the Samsung bloatware. Everything runs quickly (Word, Excel, OneNote, web browsing, YouTube movies, etc). Mine came with XP home which I like because it needs less overhead than 7, consumes less power, and doesn't have the want to be upgraded like 7 Starter does. I'll bet it runs faster too, because it's plenty fast with XP and another reviewer said it was slow with 7. I use it a lot with Remote Desktop to get email from my main home computer, which works quite well. Wireless web browsing is fast and convenient by the way. This little computer is the cat's meow.

I bought two notebooks for Christmas, this netbook for my mother and the Toshiba mini for myself. Expecting the Toshiba to be better based off the reviews, I was shocked to find that the Samsung not only starts up faster, but it loads faster as well. I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that the Samsung N130 runs on XP and not Windows Starter 7. I also noticed that the webcam is better and the design of the touch pad is better as well.

I was forced to buy an extra gig upgrade for the Toshiba mini to compensate for how slow it was. Which was annoying because the Samsung was cheaper to start with.

I would recommend this notebook if you want a cheap, long lasting netbook for light use.

I purchased the N-130 used via Amazon. Having some experience with Linux, I tried many live CD's using a Lexar s50 8Gb jumpdrive, which is a usb stick that this netbook happily recognizes as a boot source if the BIOS is configured correctly. Non-ubuntu live cd's such as Fedora 15 & Debian 6 as well as Puppy Linux 5.2.8 did not appear to recognize the Realtek Wifi and so Internet access was not possible (easily anyway).

As for offical Ubuntu distros (which I've tested from the Hard Drive), I've had some trouble with them connecting to the Internet via wifi. They either connect right away upon bootup or they time out then ask for the router's security key, but once you get a time out, it will never accept the security key and you must reboot. Connection success seems to be better than 50%. This seems to be a problem with 11.04 and 11.10 distros. At least, my experience has been similar with Lubuntu 11.10, Xubuntu 11.04/11.10 and Ubuntu 11.04/11.10.

The other problem I had is with a VERY serious screen flicker with 11.10 ubuntu-based distro's. It's as if two programmers (one coding perhaps at the kernel level and another coding closer to the display manager) have code that is fighting over the power management features of the netbook. Anyway, 11.10 should probably be avoided for this netbook for now. As for the 11.04 distro's, the screen flicker is a bit more alleviated with xubuntu (xfce desktop) than the classic ubuntu(gnome 2/unity). First of all, when it does happen on xubuntu it's recoverable by pressing the ctrl key, and, the keyboard brightness functions do work. You can practically eliminate the occurance by setting all the power manager settings to "Never", then configure the screen saver to blank screen. So, I've settled on xubuntu 11.04 for now and its runs great with 1Gb of RAM. It never hits the swap file. CPU utilization is around 10%. Ubuntu's gnome 2.x, on the other hand, was running at about 15% CPU utilization, so it is basically adding another 5% load on the CPU.

It came with Windows 7 Starter and it is s-l-o-w. It really needs the upgrade to 2Gb RAM to alleviate some of this. Hope you find this to be useful.