Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2

With the IdeaPad S10-2, Lenovo has put its netbook line on a diet, shaving 0.2 pounds off the weight and 0.2 inches off the thickness (at its thinnest point) of the original S10. While some may like the new look, we think it's a giant leap backward in attractiveness.

While the original S10 has a sleek, futuristic aesthetic with squared off edges, attractive metal accents, and vents that look like they belong on a spaceship, the S10-2 just looks cheap. Its white glossy plastic lid (also available in pink, gray, or black) is adorned with an unattractive circle-patterned imprint that is reminiscent of 1970s-era wallpaper or the Target logo, depending on your point of view. The hinge covers, which had been sleek metal discs on the S10, look like a pair of used thumbtacks.




Worse, still the 6-cell battery bulges out of the S10-2’s gaunt frame so dramatically that it actually makes the system 0.4 inches thicker in back than its predecessor (1.4 to 1.8 inches) and gives the whole netbook a bit of a lopsided feel. Even if you don't mind the S10-2's design, it just can't compare to the ultra attractive Toshiba NB205, the ultra thin Eee PC 1005HA (with its flush battery), or the clean looks of the Samsung N120.

Screen and Webcam on the S10-2

The S10-2's 10.1-inch screen provides a native resolution of 1024x600, which is the same as major competitors such as the Samsung N120, the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA, and the Toshiba mini NB205. However, it is a bit more spacious than the IdeaPad S10e and a few other netbooks from HP and Dell which have only 1024x576 resolutions.

Images appear bright and colorful on the glossy, but not too-glossy screen. Viewing angles are solid from 45 degrees horizontally, though colors start to wash out as you get closer to 90 degrees along the vertical axis. When making a Skype call and when using the bundled facial recognition software, the 2.0-megapixel webcam produced sharp images, though colors were a bit muted.

With its 1.6-GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and 1GB of RAM, the IdeaPad S10-2 delivered a very strong score of 1,598 on PCMark05, a program that measures overall performance. This score was the second highest we've ever seen on a netbook, falling behind only the Dell Latitude 2100 and beating the netbook category average by more than 200 points.

The S10-2 completed our video transcoding test, in which we convert a 5-minute-and-5-second MP4 to AVI using HandBrake, in a 28 minutes and 55 seconds. That time is a few seconds faster than the netbook average of 29:09, though it's slightly slower than the 27:23 and 27:25 turned in by the Toshiba NB205 and ASUS Eee PC 1005HA respectively.

The S10-2's Intel 945GSE graphics chip produced a score of 651 on 3DMark03 (which measures graphics performance), which is just slightly above the netbook category average of 641. We were unable to run 3DMark06, a later version of the program.

After we removed a slow-loading trial of Norton Internet Security, the 5,400-rpm, 160GB Western Digital hard drive booted Windows XP in a reasonable 46 seconds, which is about 9 seconds faster than the netbook average of 54.7 seconds.

On our LAPTOP File transfer test, in which we copy 4.97GB of mixed-media files from one folder to another, the drive managed a strong rate of 18.5 MBps, which is 20 percent better than the netbook average of 15 MBps but not as fast as the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA which copied at a rate of 19.9 MBps.