Lenovo IdeaPad S10 Netbook Review

After waiting long and hard for a decent netbook to come out, I finally made the plunge with a Lenovo IdeaPad S10. The one thing that impressed and influenced my decision the most was build quality. Think of a Lenovo S10 as a Lexus and something like an Acer Aspire One as a Toyota. For the most part, the power under the hood is the same, but the build quality is much better. Retail price on an S10 is $429 for the 1GB/160GB configuration, but Newegg has them for as low as $349.

Specifications:

CPU: 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270
RAM: 1GB DDR2 667MHz
OS: Windows XP Home (SP3)
Screen: 10.2″ WSVGA AntiGlare TFT with webcam 1024×600 resolution
Hard Drive: 160GB 5400RPM
Graphics: Integrated Intel GMA 950
Wireless: 802.11b/g
Connectivity: 4-in-1 media card reader, 1x ExpressCard slot, 2x USB 2.0, 1x VGA, 1x 10/100 Ethernet, headphone/microphone jack
Battery: 3 Cell Lithium-Ion
Dimensions: 9.8″ x 7.2″ x 1.2″ (including feet)
Weight: 2.64 lbs (with 3-cell battery)

Build

Build quality is top notch and is exactly what you should expect from a Lenovo product. The plastics feel very rugged and the laptop does not flex. It feels as solid as a sheet of wood. I was thinking about purchasing an Aspire One, but the price difference was only $50. For me, even though the power under the hood is the same, I still can’t get over having a cheap feeling laptop, especially one I’ll be using every day.

The design and paint make the S10 stand out among the other netbooks. While most netbooks look almost like toys, the S10 looks like a scaled down, modern business laptop. Soft curves and semi-reflective flat black paint gives it a nice, professional look.

Performance

I was greatly surprised by the performance of this little netbook as it was way better than I expected. Windows XP boots up to the desktop in less than a minute and the system is extremely responsive. I thought that I would be waiting for the start menu to come up, waiting for My Computer to open, etc. I was completely wrong! Under normal usage (playing movies/music, browsing web), programs like Firefox and Winamp opened quickly. While not as fast as a beefed up quad core machine, it was fast enough to please somebody as picky as me. Even with multiple programs and multiple tabs open in Firefox, multi-tasking was a breeze and there was little to no lag while switching between programs.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Typing on a netbook keyboard will take some getting used to, regardless of what you get. The same goes for the S10; typing takes some getting used to. It took me a few hours of playing around before I got the hang of things. Three weird things with the keyboard: 1) There’s no tilde (~) key to the left of the 1 key 2) Function (Fn) key where Ctrl should be and 3) F11 and F12 are the same key

Other than that, adjusting is relatively easy. The keyboard requires little force to press a key down and each key feels flat and even meaning you can push the extreme left/right/top/bottom and register a successful key press. Like typical laptop keyboards, the keys are slightly “springy” and spring back into position soft and quietly, but enough to give you tactile feedback.

The touchpad has a grainy feel, but it’s a little smoother than your average touch pad. Sensitivity and responsiveness are great and there are even dedicated horizontal/vertical scrolling areas on the touchpad, which come in handy while browsing the web.

LCD Display

The 10.2″ LCD screen is nice and bright with great viewing angles. You can easily make out the screen even at an almost completely horizontal/vertical viewing angle. The matte surface on the screen helps readability in direct sunlight, which it does very well. Typically, LCD displays get very washed out in sunlight. If you’ve ever used a laptop with a glossy screen, you know what I’m talking about.

The brightness and contrast are excellent as well. While the screen can get very bright, it doesn’t wash out colors and text like I’ve seen others do. For normal every day use, I’d say that you won’t tell a difference in quality versus a regular LCD monitor. However, I wouldn’t do any work where color reproduction is vital because the small LCD isn’t up for the task, but what did you expect in a sub $400 netbook?

Battery Life

With a 3-cell battery, you can almost predict the battery life to be in between 2-3 hours for a netbook. While I have seen battery life results all over the internet, I never found a good, real world usage result, so I decided to do my own. The point of this test was to establish a minimum battery life run time by using performance intensive applications. Basically, the test was performed by playing a movie from my TVersity server in a Firefox window. Here were the conditions:

• LCD brightness at max
• Wireless on
• Streaming video over internet from TVersity server
• Headphones plugged in, mid level volume
• Average of 60% CPU usage over entire test
• No power saving options
• No CPU throttling – CPU always at max 1.6GHz

The battery ended up lasting 1 hour 45 minutes before Windows went into standby mode at 3% battery life. While 1 hour 45 minutes doesn’t sound like much, keep in mind that I was taxing the system quite hard and using up lots of power while doing so. I’d say you can expect close to 3 hours or more with normal internet usage. Be on the lookout for a 6 cell battery to be released soon. In the meantime, here are some tips to increase battery life:

• Decrease LCD brightness
• Throttle CPU to minimum frequency – use power management program that came installed
• Turn Wireless off
• Turn audio off
• Disable unused network adapters

Ports and Features

Here’s where the Lenovo S10 is a little lacking. An extra USB port would help since it only has two USB ports and bluetooth connectivity would be great. However, I wouldn’t base your decision off of port selection because one less USB port is just an inconvenience (not an impossible solution) and bluetooth sounds good in theory, but not so great in practice. The bandwidth limitations of bluetooth make syncing phones, transferring files, or even sharing an internet connection a very slow process compared to using a USB connection. Sure, bluetooth would be nice for something like a bluetooth mouse, but it is not really necessary.

However, the S10 makes up for the missing USB port by introducing an ExpressCard slot. This slot is basically like a PCMCIA slot which lets you install things like network adapters, USB adapters, bluetooth adapters, etc.

Upgrading the hard drive and RAM is very easy. Just remove a cover on the bottom of the laptop and you’ll have access to the hard drive and RAM slots.

Heat and Noise

The heat and noise is not bad, but it’s not good either. The keyboard area gets warm with moderate use, but not hot. For some people, this may be a little uncomfortable, but I find it to be reasonable. Noise isn’t a concern until you do something graphics or CPU intensive. A single internal fan is located within the netbook which only turns on when it’s needed. However, being a small fan spinning at high RPMs, it makes more noise than a fan on a standard sized laptop. Although the fan is loud enough to be clearly heard, it isn’t loud enough to be annoying and I’ve learned to live with it.

Conclusion

Priced at less than $400, the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 is a great choice, if not the best choice for a netbook at the time of this post. It has the same processor as most netbooks nowadays (1.6GHz Intel Atom), but it comes with 1GB RAM (some units only have 512MB) and a 160GB hard drive (some come with smaller drives, or solid state drives). Coupled with a 10.2″ LCD and top notch build quality, I sincerely believe the Lenovo S10 is the best overall netbook on the market today.

Tagged as: netbook, Product Reviews