The JNC has a reasonable range of features, including FM radio and voice recording, although no capacity for storage expansion. It can be also used as removable storage, for any file type. The software includes a simple tool to format the device, a firmware upgrade utility and RealOne Player Gold. There is no support for playlists, however, unless created within the player itself.

Just a couple of years ago, the PC speech recognition and dictation market saw four key players jostling for position, but today the contest is just between IBM and one other player, Dragon.

With only Dell's disappointing Inspiron Mini 12 so far released, Samsung doesn't have a great deal of competition at this size. The NC20 has six-hour battery life, fine performance and a superb display

A good quality netbook pipped at the post by its own stablemates.

We've all had great ideas in idle moments that are either forgotten or impractical, but these are people who identified technological advances and made them happen..

Its over a year since IBM released its major update to its ViaVoice family of speech dictation packages. At its core, ViaVoice has always been impressive.