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I love and hate to be an early adopter. Love it because it’s plain cool to put my wet shaky hands on a shiny new gadget and grab the curious looks when using it. Hate it because a few weeks after you paid a much for some next technology breakthrough the army of the better clones are appearing everywhere. It was the story with my MSI Wind U90 – the first 9″ LCD netbook available here in 2008. With the new nVidia Ion bigger screen netbook niche I had an illusion of choice.

There are two products in this niche available on a local market by the end of Jan, 2010: Lenovo S12 nVidia Ion and HP mini 311. Fortunately, the choice was very simple because HP mini 311 came with Window XP preinstalled but mostly due to its $70 more expensive price tag. That’s why this review is titled:

Lenovo S12 nVidia Ion

When the Lenovo S12 is sitting alone on the desk you will hardly tell it from a normal adult notebook. If there is nothing to compare it with Lenovo S12 looks just like your average 12″ – 13″ Macbook. It has a descent (for a netbook) 12.1″ LED LCD and a full sized keyboard. All two things that differ Lenovo S12 Ion from a notebook and gives it a right to be called a netbook are hidden beneath its wonderful keyboard.

The first thing is the Atom N270 CPU. Not the newest one, not the fastest (well, it is slow one actually), single core. It works and nothing more. Thanks to nVidia Ion your apps have a GPU share some load. And the second thing is S12 price tag – it’s just four times cheaper than the average Macbook.

The bright and crystal clear LED back-lit 12.1″ LCD screen has 1280*800 pixels resolution which makes things not so tiny as on the more common nowadays 1360*768 pixels 11.6″ LCDs but still brings plenty of space for almost any task. You can browse web and edit webpages (just don’t forget to press ctrl++ to save your eyesight). You can work with spreadsheets and presentations without any clutter. You can manage your photos and develop some RAW files on the go.

Typing is as easy as on a full size 15″ laptops. Did I mentioned that Lenovo S12 keyboard is very good? Yeah, it is. Also S12 netbook is quite thin – less than 2cm open – which makes typing even more comfortable. Lenovo S12 Ion is the coolest laptop I’ve ever seen. I mean if you put your palms on its keyboard you won’t say it’s really warmer than a table it rests on. The only part that’s getting a little hot after a couple hours of work is one the netbook’s back where the wireless card and a memory expansion slot are located. Definitely, WiFi adapter is the hottest part.

As you can see on a picture above, the port selection of the Lenovo S12 nVidia Ion is on par with the other netbooks and lightweight notebooks on the market and includes HDMI port – nice feature because nVidia Ion is great for HD video. On the other side of S12 you’ll find two more USB ports, SD card reader and an awesome WiFi on|off lever.

nVidia Ion

What makes Lenovo S12 and other netbooks with nVidia Ion graphics special is their ability to remain cheap, lightweight and energy efficient while being able to run pretty heavy applications like modern 3D games. Lenovo S12 nVidia Ion is running World of Warcraft pretty smooth on S12 native 1280*800 screen resolution with 25-35 frames per second. More on the World of Warcraft performance on nVidia Ion in the next post.

Lenovo S12 Battery Life

When it comes to battery life, Lenovo S12 promises at least two hours without any powersaving mode one – with the screen is shining bright, nVidia Ion is grinding numbers and Wi-Fi module is pinging them back and forth.

If you’ll try to save some power… e.g. dim the screen a little bit and try not to use GPU so hard, you will find that it will last for a little more than three hours. Not much for web surfing but quite ok for a connected typewriter mode, when you are typing something in Google Docs or working with spreadsheets.

There is another one mode. It’s called “turn of almost anything”. In this mode your Lenovo S12 won’t use nVidia Ion, no sounds, no Wi-Fi, LCD brightness will be set to minimum. Actually, reading is the only activity I can imagine with such settings, but it will last for almost five hours – enough for a pretty long ride.