Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2

Lenovo has a comprehensive selection of netbooks and the S10-S stands as the firm's newest offering. Is it any good?

In terms of performance the S10-2 has reasonable gusto thanks to its 1.6GHz Atom N280 processor which features HyperThreading technology. This enables the processor to process two threads simultaneously, which gives the netbook a boost in performance when it comes to multithreaded software (such as Adobe's Photoshop). There's also a gigabyte of memory and a 160GB hard drive and tying everything together is Intel's 945GSE chipset.

These components combined help the machine produce PCMark CPU, memory and hard drive scores of 1548, 2319 and 4655. With the exception of the memory score - which is slightly below par compared to other netbooks - the CPU and hard drive numbers are higher than all the netbooks we tested in our January issue. Impressive. The netbook's battery life of two hours and 50 minutes is also very decent.

Using the netbook on a day-to-day basis the IdeaPad proved comfortable as far as its keyboard and 10.1-inch LCD screen were concerned. The keyboard's keys whilst a little small proved responsive and easy to work with while the LCD returned sharp visuals that were reasonably bright and contrasted. The only area where the Lenovo fell short slightly was with its trackpad as, like most netbooks, we found it too small to use for long periods of time.