User interface elements
Speaking of LEDs, the backlight on the NC20's display is impressively bright. Even a relatively pricey older laptop with a CCFL backlight won't match the NC20's peak brightness, and I suspect many NC20 owners will prefer to work at levels between 40% and 60% of the display's peak illumination.

But the big story here is the NC20's native resolution. I love my Eee PC 1000H—or at least I really like it in a healthy, manly way—but working within the confines of its 1024x600 pixel grid oftentimes feels painfully cramped. Not so with the NC20, whose 1280x800 screen offers plenty of breathing room.

Unfortunately, like a great many laptops these days, the NC20's LCD appears to be based on a TN panel. The giveaways are less-than-stellar color reproduction and a narrow optimal viewing angle. Color contrast varies dramatically within a range of five to ten degrees vertically, so I found myself tinkering with the screen's position on the hinge to get things "dialed in" before each use. Of course, one can hardly make this criticism about the NC20 alone. The new MacBooks, to name but one example, have a display whose quality may not even match the NC20's—and MacBooks cost over twice the price.

Now, let's talk gloss. I am a proponent of transreflective (that is: "glossy") coatings on laptop displays. Done right, they make tremendous sense. Such coatings allow more light to pass through from the backlight, which can conserve battery life, and they are unequaled in their down-to-the-pixel sharpness. Even the best matte displays look muddy by contrast. I've used a Sharp laptop with a glossy screen for years now, and I continue to appreciate its merits.

Even so, the NC20's glossy display coating bugs me. It seems to reflect more light than some, and to do so very harshly. Sharp highlights behind you translate into sharp lines of interference on the screen. Add in the display's narrow optimal viewing angle, and you have a recipe for frustration. Adapting to harsh lighting conditions can be rather difficult. I consider this problem the be the NC20's single biggest drawback.

Happily, the NC20's keyboard demands very few compromises. You can see in the picture that our sample's keyboard doesn't have a U.S.-only layout, but the key placements follow the typical U.S. style, as do the NC20s selling on these shores. The most apparent potential complaint in this layout might be the relatively small space bar, but it didn't cause me any grief. The only difficult adaptation for me had to do with the page-up and page-down keys, which I hit much too often when aiming for an arrow key.

Beyond that one frustration, I have no complaints. The key caps are nicely textured, and the whole mechanism works very well. The chassis feels as if it were machined out of a single piece of high-grade plastic, with no hint of keyboard flex and no rattle from other keys as you bang away at high speed. Key travel is shallow, but the positive feedback of the scissor-style switch mechanism reassures. As a writer, I'm hypersensitive about keyboard quality, and I would purchase an NC20 for myself with no hesitation.

And yes, that is a ThinkPad next to the NC20 in the picture above, and I want desperately to compare the NC20 to it. Such things have become horribly cliche, though, so I'll refrain. Although the comparison would put the NC20 in a very good light, if I were to make it.

Samsung bills the NC20's keyboard as 97% of full size, but such claims are slippery. For those who care, the NC20's keyboard area is 90% of the width of our reference "full-size keyboard" (from my colleague Geoff's old 14" Dell laptop) and 92% of its height, or only 83% of its total area. More notably, perhaps, the NC20's alpha keys are 97% of full width and 95% of full height, and they occupy 91% of the area that our full-size keyboard's alpha keys do. To me, that's largely immaterial. The NC20's keyboard is large enough not to call attention to itself, and that's what matters.

The NC20's touchpad is of the Synaptics variety, with a finely textured surface, adequate (and adjustable) sensitivity, and enough surface area to satisfy even this Eee PC 1000H user. The only multi-touch function supported by Synaptics' latest drivers is zoom, though—no two-fingered scroll for you! The dedicated scroll area on the pad works well enough, but it's just not as gratifying as a multi-touch swipe.

The other bits and pieces of the NC20 are serviceable, if not sexy. The webcam's image quality is fine—for a 1.3 megapixel webcam—and the speakers are decent enough. There's not much in the way of bass output, of course, but the sound is clear and crisp, with plenty of volume and little distortion at peak levels. In this, the NC20 participates in recent progress. If you're accustomed to a laptop that's two or three years old, the NC20's sound quality may surprise you.