Lenovo's IdeaPad S10 Reviewed

If you regularly find yourself sitting on the couch in front of the TV with a 15- or 17-inch laptop browsing the web, you'll fall in love with the netbook form factor. My main gripe is the amount of scrolling one has to do in normal use of the web, due to the fact that web designers have long since delegated 600-pixel-high displays to the same basket as "Under Construction" GIFs and Microsoft-proprietary non-standard HTML tags.

The default installation of Internet Explorer provided with Windows XP Home proved incredibly slow for rich AJAX interfaces like Webmail, so we decided to install a beta of Minefield, the code name for Firefox 3.1. This offered such an enormous boost in performance we urge anyone using a Windows operating system on a low-power machine to try it out.

Regardless of your choice of browser, if you've become accustomed to browsing on a high-powered machine and often find yourself with 20+ browser tabs open, you will need to change your ways to make the most of a netbook. Streaming video will become choppy with more than a few tabs open, and become completely unwatchable once your tab count reaches double digits.

Entertainment

While newer, graphically-intensive games are completely ruled out by the integrated graphics chipset on board the IdeaPad S10, there should be plenty of grunt here to run the classics like Starcraft and Warcraft III - both of which were running on the Asus' original 900MHz Eee PC. Whether or not you'll actually enjoy playing them with the tiny trackpad is another matter entirely.

Streaming video fared extremely well, provided one keeps their browser tabs to a bare minimum. With a single tab of Minefield/Firefox 3 open, I was able to stream HD from HD Web with perfect sound and near-perfect video, that very occasionally dropped frames.

Bittorrent junkies will be glad to know that DVD rips and the lower-resolution HDTV rips that most TV episodes are distributed in play back perfectly. 720p video is watchable, but only if VLC is the only thing running on the machine. 1080p was completely unwatchable.

Despite the 1080p resolution being complete and utter overkill for a screen of this size and resolution, we have to mention it incase someone with a massive library of 1080p MKV files thinks they'll be able to get away without transcoding to a less CPU intensive format.

...continued