Lenovo's IdeaPad S10 Netbook
Hi, it’s Dave Altavilla for Hot Hardware. Today, we’re going to take a look at a new product offering from Lenovo. They can actually be categorized as a netbook. Now, you might be wondering, what exactly is a netbook? Well, earlier this year, Intel introduced a new product concept. A new class of sub notebooks if you will that was designed in ultra portable, ultra light, 7 and 10 inch LCD based form factors. With a low power consumption, low cost, solid internet connectivity, and basic functionalities. Today we’ll going to take a look at Lenovo’s idea pad S10, which is based on the low power Intel Atom processor. Let’s take a look. The Lenovo idea pad S10 is a 10 LCD based netbook. And to give you a sense of scale, we’ve place it in a foreground here, if front of an Asus Eee PC 4G 7 inch netbook. Now obviously, the S10 is a significantly larger machine. But we really like the happy medium that a 10 inch netbook strikes. Giving user a lot more work space and certainly a lot more screen real estate as you’ll see. Interestingly, Lenovo chose a pearl white finish for this model, which is strikingly similar to the Asus pearl white finish from the Eee PC. On the left side view of the system, you can see Lenovo fan louver slots to exhaust warm air from the system when it’s operating. There’s also an AC adapter port for jack, VGA output port, multimedia flashcard reader, and USB 2.0 port. On the right side of the S10, and very uncommon for a netbook, Lenovo decided to include the PCI express card slot. In addition, there’s a headphone jack, microphone jack, USB 2.0 port, and our 10100 ethernet port. On the front edge of the S10 are systems status indicator lights for power, battery, and hard drive. In addition, there are speaker ports, which we felt was a nice place within this grill area of the system. On the back side of the S10, we have access to standard releases for the systems battery. Three cell battery. And of course, the standard utility hatch, if you will, to get inside the systems component area. We have access to DDR2 667 system memory, and our standard 2 and a half inch hard drive. You know, packed in with the S10, Lenovo includes this tiny power brick, which does a nice job of powering the system, but stays out of the way. Traditionally you get various user guides. Quick set up guides, and a manual for Lenovo’s one key rescue system software, which provides back up, incremental back up and various recovery CD creation utility. Unfortunately, Lenovo does not provide any full software installation CDs or DVDs with the S10. The keyboard of the S10 is a miniaturized notebook layout. Although the key caps are actually a little bit larger than, say, an average 7 inch netbook, it still feels though a cramp in here in our opinion. And it’s going to take the average end user a little bit of practice to get use to typing on this machine. The S10 does include an integrated touch pad with two button functionality, microphone port and an integrated webcam as well. The idea pad S10 comes pre-loaded from the factory with Microsoft’s Windows XP home edition. During our testing, we did notice that the systems fan spun up to an audible level. But it wasn’t annoyingly so. Also, we really like the S10’s LCD screen, which offers sharp image quality, good viewing angle, brightness and contrast. Performance in its system responsiveness for the idea pad S10 was actually fairly solid. We fired up a standard 720p high definition digital video clip, just to see how the machine will respond. We observe some of the order of 40-60 percent CPU utilization playing back this clip. As you can see, even in full screen view, the machine responds nicely with no drop frames and smooth playback. Finally, we decided to hook up the S10 to our power meter to determine the system’s power consumption under idle conditions and under loaded conditions as well. As you can see here, idling, on a Windows desktop, the system consumes about 15 watts of power. If we fire up our high definition digital video clip, maybe do a little bit of web browsing simultaneously. You can see the system raps up to about 20-21 watts of power under more loaded conditions. We should note that the systems standard 3 cell battery offers about 2 and a half hours of battery life. And we hope that Lenovo comes out with a 6 cell battery option to extend that even further. But right now, 3-cell is the only option for the S10. We really like the Lenovo idea pad S10 for its solid build quality, high purpobality, low power profile, good performance and well rounded feature set. But, pretty much has everything you’d want in a netbook as long as you can learn how to navigate around that slightly crampy keyboard. You’ll find that the Lenovo idea pad online for a base price starting at around 399 dollars. Stop by the site for the full review, I’m Dave Altavilla for Hot Hardware. Thanks for stopping by.