Review: Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2

If there’s one thing you can tell about Lenovo, it’s that the company doesn’t like having idle hands around the place: Even as its netbook engineers were working on the company’s new 12-inch model, the IdeaPad S12, Lenovo called for a makeover of its existing 10.1-inch netbook. So say goodbye to the IdeaPad S10 and hello to the S10-2, which enters the hottest segment of the netbook market with new features at a new price point: $349 with your choice of a black, white or gray polka-dot-patterned lid, or $359 if you’d rather be pretty in pink.

Compared to the S10, the S10-2 is seven ounces lighter — 2.7 pounds counting a 6-cell battery that props the netbook at a comfortable typing angle — and a few millimeters thinner (7.6 by 10.2 by 1.8 inches). The battery averaged a respectable four and a half hours in our work sessions, which included a good deal of Wi-Fi Web surfing and disk-intensive software installation and system recovery; simple word processing or other productivity tasks should last five hours easily.