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A 12-inch display and Ion GPU may possibly make Lenovo?s S12 the primary netbook you can stay on.
This week, Lenovo released its S12 netbook with the Nvidia Ion graphics processor being an selection. Although I haven’t had a chance to play with one yet, I’ve just completed two weeks using the Acer Revo Aspire, which is a similar configuration in a mini desktop. Combining the two, I have a pretty good sense of just how blurred the lines between netbooks and notebooks are becoming, and whether you could stay on one of these hybrid products.
Size Matters
Netbooks usually have 10-inch or smaller screens, which relegates most of them to relatively light use. This means e-mail, short documents, picture viewing and some light video viewing. You could up the graphics,
Office 2007 Pro Key, but the display screen is so small, you’d have to go to an external monitor to get the benefit.
The 12-inch screen has, for some time, been the smallest useful size for a notebook. The Lenovo S12 is a netbook with a 12-inch display screen, which means, if it has the power, it can function as a full notebook. It’s also thin, ######y, fully loaded , has over four hours of battery life (in realistic usage scenarios, not maximum), and comes in just under $500. Like most of the laptops in its class, it also has no optical drive, which helps both battery life and keeps that very thin look.
Performance: Lovin’
Windows 7
The Acer Revo Aspire came with Windows Vista loaded, and Acer changed the base configuration shortly after I received my system to add more memory. Vista is too slow on this generation of system, which is likely why the Lenovo Notebook ships with Windows XP. The single-core Atom processor appears to be where the system bottlenecks. It is capable of playing Blu-Ray movies (although you don’t want much running in the background), and the game performance is up to things like World of Warcraft, but not high-resolution 1st person shooters.
Putting the release candidate for
Windows 7 on the Revo made a huge difference. If you don’t mind running pre-release software, or doing a clean install of the final release of
Windows 7 once it ships, this class of system loves
Windows 7,
Windows 7 Professional Key, and once it cache’s your applications, you'll be able to go in and out of sleep very quickly. If you do need to reboot,
Office Pro, with a single core processor, you don’t see the huge boot time improvement you get on a multi-core system, but
Windows 7 is leaner and noticeably faster than Windows Vista.
If you don’t want to move to either
Windows 7 or Vista any time soon, this is likely the last run of systems that ship with XP, so you'll be able to move at your leisure.
Before we move on: If you do put
Windows 7 on one of these,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, pick up a USB ReadyBoost-compliant 2GB flash drive. You’ll see a noticeable jump in performance if you use it in a system configured like the Lenovo is with 1GB of memory.
Wrapping Up
There is this idea that you can’t stay on netbooks and nettops, and without something like an Nvidia Ion and at least a 12-inch display, that idea is likely valid. However, once you add Ion, suddenly you get the promise of something that is small, ######y, low-power and widely usable. In a market looking for value, second PCs, PCs for kids, and low-cost PCs to replace aging hulks, these hybrid netbooks and nettops fill a unique and valuable void. You can get something fun, cool to use, and you won’t go broke doing it.
When Apple put Nvidia graphics across its entire line,
Office 2010 Standard, it showcased how important graphics performance is (and in the case of the MacBook Air, made it usable). With Ion, it is possible to get nearly the same thing at under 30 percent of the price, and that, my friends, is a really good deal. With a 12-inch screen and Ion GPU, this new Lenovo isn’t a netbook. Lenovo is setting its sights on Apple with a very portable, low-cost notebook, and one of the best values in the segment.
Office 2010 Standard Blurring the Line Between Net
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