Lenovo IdeaPad S10

Lenovo’s S10 follows the mini laptop trend of the moment: technology on the go with a 10’’display, a hard drive (from 80 to 160 GB) and the usual Intel Atom processor.

Handling and Design

Lenovo’s S10 has a solid build and offers a choice of colours: ruby red, classic white, bold black, deep blue and pastel pink.


As you can see on the picture, the touchpad is very small (only 2,5 cm long). This is far from ideal, so an external mouse is almost necessary here. The keyboard has a comfortable size. The right/left click buttons are in matte metal and are a bit nosiy.

Even though on the whole the laptop is rather silent, when the internal cooling fan kicks into high gear you will definitely hear it.

The webcam colours aren’t the best. There is quite a long lag between the moment one moves and the retranscription of the movement on the screen.

The microphone is on the front edge of the notebook (bottom left on picture) so all the typing can be heard. But as its sensitivity is actually very poor, you would have to talk (or type) very loudly to be heard.

On the sides you will find: 2 USB, 1 RJ45, 1 VGA (out at 1920x1200 pixels), 2 mini-Jacks, a 4-in-1 memory card reader, an ExpressCard/34 slot. The latter can be used for extensions such as a port FireWire, USB 2 TV tuner …

The volume of the speakers is quite weak, hardly enough to watch movie on your own with some noise around. We can’t recommend enough the use of a headset.

When you take out the 2 screws from below the netbook, you have access to the RAM (512 MB by Ramaxel) and to the 2,5 inch hard drive.

Express Card, 2 mini Jack	USB, RJ45
VGA, memory card slo USB	Webcam

Processor Power

Mini laptop components are all very similar and all these devices share an Intel Atom processor. The main difference will be SSD or hard drive and its rapidity. The S10 has (above) average results : read speeds are at 55 MB/s, although this figure gradually slows down to 30 MB/s as the disk fills up.

The Intel processor allows you to do everything a normal PC would do: picture and video editing, compressing files, presentations for work…It will just be two or three times slower than a recent Core 2 Duo processor. Is that really a problem? It shouldn’t, as this is not the sort of machine you would use to edit your latest HD movie.

The machine takes 41 seconds to boot.

Video playback is good, it is only with heavy HD that you loose fluidity.

Games

With nothing else but a Intel GMA 950 graphc chipset, it would be ambitious to try anything else than 2D or some light 3D games.

Battery Life & Portability

At 1,2 Kg (2.65 lb) this is a rather light 10 inch mini laptop. The charger weighs 300 gr, which is just about average.

Battery life was short: 1h43 compared to the 5 hours of some models. The test was conducted on the low capacity battery included. A 6 cell battery (high capacity) is also available.