The N128 sports a standard set of input & outport ports which're found onboard most netbooks. You get three USB 2.0 ports, a 3-in-1 media card reader (SD, SDHC & MMC), 3.5mm headphone-out/line-out jack, 3.5mm microphone jack, Ethernet port and a VGA out port. Miscellaeous ports include the Kensington Security Lock slot and the DC-in port. Not much conclusions to be drawn here since these ports are a defacto standard onboard netbooks.
A quick tour around the Samsung N128 -
Front: Heat-vent, 3-in-1 card reader, Power On/Off switch.
Left: Ethernet port, VGA out, Heat-vent, USB port, Mic-in, Headphone-out
Right: 2 x USB ports, Kensington security slot, DC in.
Back
Performance:
There's not much to be written about the performance of a netbook. A netbook is NOT meant to do high-end gaming, run 3D rendering applications, AV editing or viewing HD rips - at least not yet! We may have netbooks or handheld devices in the future which may do all that and even more but as of today a netbook does what it is supposed to - web browsing, email, IM, using MS Office apps, do presentations, mobile entertainment such as listening to music, viewing 480p SD movies & trailers etc. to name a few.
Video playback performance was decent. 480p files such as the DVD rips played flawlessly with the CPU usage accounting to about 25% to 30%. A 720p file layed with some stutter and a few dropped frames - the CPU usage was around 50% to 60%. A 1080p file played with broken audio, frequent stutter and dropped frames most of the time which concludes this is not your next multimedia laptop!
Here's a screenshot which shows the HDTune benchmark for the stock Samsung Spinpoint HM160HI hard drive:
The boot time of the netbook with Windows 7 Ultimate x86 loaded was as well recorded and the test was repeated thrice to ensure I wasn't being deceived here! The laptop booted within 35 seconds to the desktop with the Avira Antivirus Trial version loaded! Considering it's a 5400rpm SATA 1.5Gbps hard drive, this's mighty impressive a feat, to say the least.
Battery Life:
The N128 features a 6-cell Li-ion battery - something which low-priced netbooks do not come up with! In an endurance test where the battery was charged to 100%, screen brightness set to 3 bars, WLAN active and the power plan set to 'balanced', the system stayed on for 6 hours and 43 minutes of constant use. When the screen brightness was turned down the lowest setting and the rest of the setup maintaned the same, the battery should see through another 15 minutes before the netbook switches to standby mode . The best balance between battery and life and the brightness could be when the brightness is set to 3 bars.
Unfortunately there does not seem to be an upgrade option for the battery.
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