By now, Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs need no introduction. Since their debut late last year, the procs have been on the hot list of every red-blooded power user. But getting at them hasn’t been easy. Particularly the mobile parts, which hadn’t even hit the market in new notebooks before the now-infamous SATA 3Gb/s port issue brought product flow to a grinding halt.

If we hadn’t just spent time ogling HP’s Envy 17, we might have appreciated the Samsung RF710’s aesthetics more. After all, it too sports a sleek, sophisticated design. It’s just that everything about the RF710 looks low-rent compared to the Envy 17. That’s not so surprising, considering that the RF710 costs more than $1,000 less. The two notebooks have nearly the exact same dimensions, but the RF710 is a pound or so lighter. That’s because, rather than sporting an all-metal chassis, as the Envy 17 does, the RF710 is primarily plastic. It’s made to look nice, with a metallic finish offsetting the chiclet keyboard, and a glossy black finish on the lid and screen bezel—which will unfortunately be marred by fingerprints in short order.

We didn’t want to admit it, but it’s true: The Atom netbook market is a snooze. Netbooks based on Intel’s Atom platform (currently in its Pine Trail incarnation) ship with a 10.1-inch screen, 1GB of RAM, a 1.6GHz single-core Atom processor, Windows 7 Starter, blah blah blah. Netbooks with Nvidia’s Ion graphics architecture are more interesting, but they’re few and far between. At night, faint echoes from the ventilation shafts whisper of AMD’s forthcoming Atom smasher, code-named Ontario, which could signal a new dawn for the genre. But for now, the best we can hope for in this thoroughly commoditized market is a netbook that performs as well as its peers but looks good doing so. Samsung’s N210, which we reviewed in July, rocked a gorgeous Space Age aesthetic and a great keyboard but was packed to the exhaust ports with bloatware. The N230 has the same hardware, but in the slimmest, sleekest frame we’ve ever seen on a netbook. Where the N210 was Space Age, the N230 is pure modern.

By eschewing the multilayer clear-on-white plastic shell of the N210 for a single-layer, slim black carapace, Samsung made the N230’s profile sleeker—at its thickest it’s still less than an inch thick, and most parts of it are three-quarters of that. It’s also the lightest netbook we’ve ever tested, at just two pounds, five ounces (tied with the very first Acer Aspire One we tested in December 2008 for lap weight, and even lighter than that netbook when the power brick is included). Skipping the 6-cell battery did wonders for the N230’s weight and lines, but with a 3-cell battery, the N230 doesn’t last as long as its peers: It tapped out of our video rundown test 10 minutes short of the four-hour mark—70 minutes sooner than the N210 and nearly four-and-a-half hours short of the HP Mini 5102 (September 2010). All other benchmark scores were indistinguishable from those of any other Pine Trail netbook.