Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3 Review

Review Summary

Very impressed with the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3. For a 10-incher, it has one of the best keyboards I’ve laid my fingers on. It’s very quiet and provides good battery life (7 - 8 hours). Build material feels nice, not plasticky. I only have praise though if I have to mention one fault it would be the buttonless trackpad. Scrolling wasn’t as responsive as I’d like and navigating with two hands on the trackpad requires a little getting used to.

For what you get, value is very good at $349 - $369 mark. Lenovo.com occasionally offers coupons for the IdeaPad S10-3.

Where to buy the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3?

Lenovo.com, Amazon.com, Newegg

Specs

There are a few nice extras on the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3. It’s 3G ready. APS protects the HDD against drops and quick movements. (I tested quickly jerking the S10-3 around, and notice the HDD shuts off momentarily - you don’t notice it normally though). Dolby Headphone.

• 10.1” 1024 x 600 display (glossy)
• Intel Atom N450 processor (1.66GHz)
• Intel NM10 chipset + GMA 3150 graphics
• 1GB RAM
• 250GB HDD
• 0.3M webcam
• 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
• Dolby Headphone
• APS (Active Protection System) impact protection
• Bluetooth
• Optional 3G
• Multi-touch trackpad / buttonless
• Windows 7 Starter
• 6-cell battery (48Wh, 10.8V)
• 1.17 kg / 2.6 pounds

Available colors: red, black

Box Contents

There’s not much in the box with the S10-3, just the bare essentials: user manual, warranty, power brick and A/C cable. That’s it. There’s some Lenovo software in Windows that allows you to create your own backup DVDs.

Layout / Ports

Top: Checkered matte lid which is slightly textured. Depending on the angle you view the lid, fingerprints can be partially visible to completely hidden, so it’s an improvement of glossy lids. You can’t see any fingerprints in the above pictures but they are there if you can catch some more light.

Left: VGA, power, USB, air vent, card reader (card is completely flush) and Wi-Fi switch above that.

Right: headphone, microphone jacks, 2x USB, RJ45 LAN, Kensington lock.

Back: Nothing but the battery.

Front: Speakers across the bottom front edge and LED status lights on the left.

Inside: Matte palm rest that’s pretty fingerprint resistant. Buttonless trackpad with two dots to indicate buttons. Power button is located on the left screen bezel. On the opposite side of the bezel are two extra buttons for recovery and starting up the instant on OS. This button also acts as a custom launch button in Windows.

Display

The S10-3 sports a glossy display with high brightness. I measured 236 cd/m2 brightness in the middle of the display which is more than enough for indoors. Colors, black depth and viewing angles all seem average. I am not able to discern any differences from other glossy netbook screens.

Screen bezel is quite thin at the top and the actual screen thickness is thinner than most netbooks, something that I felt immediately. Screen lid opens up very smoothly. Most netbooks open up quite stiffly. These three factors really add to the high quality feel of this netbook.

Here’s how far the screen folds back. Haven’t encountered a situation where I can’t get an optimal viewing angle.

Keyboard

Note that I have a Japanese keyboard - English keyboard has a single row, wider ‘Enter’, slightly larger ‘Backspace’, larger ‘Spacebar’ among some other minor arrangements.

Fantastic keyboard. Pretty much uses the same keyboard as on the larger 11.6” ThinkPad X100e notebook but of course has it squish it down a little bit though thanks to the S10-3 being slider wider than most netbooks it has no problems fitting in a very comfortable keyboard to type on. Uses up the whole chassis with no wasted space. You might notice a tiny bit of flex if you press down on the keyboard a little, but I fail to notice this when typing.

There are a few peculiarities to the keyboard layout, listed below. 

Switched Fn and CTRL keys though the CTRL key is rather large it is less of a problem that it was on earlier Lenovo netbooks. I have still been caught out a couple of times mishitting shortcut keys. You get used to it.

No volume on / off keyboard shortcut key. I’ve run into this on several occasions.

No physical F12 key. You can invoke F12 by Fn + F11 key.

Trackpad

I can’t find too many faults with the S10-3 though the trackpad certains has a few issues. Given that the S10-3 is less deep than other netbooks it has less vertical space. It does feel a little cramped but that is not really the problem, which lies with the buttonless setup.

If you navigate using just one hand you should be fine but clicking and dragging with two hands (one hand’s finger on a button, the other hand’s finger for navigating) requires a little practise at first. As the button is also the navigation surface it leads to the cursor jumping around. You can get around this by using only the very edges of the trackpad buttons as seen in the picture above. This outer area does not register as movement on the trackpad. I do not find the buttons to be particularly stiff or soft, somewhere in between as is the clicking noise.

Now, scrolling. You can scroll either two two fingers or the default scrolling on the right edge. I found both methods to be a little unresponsive and jumpy. By jumpy, I can be scrolling a few lines down then suddenly I jump right back to the top of the page. My Samsung N140 on the other hand has a trackpad that is a real joy to use - very responsive and smooth single scrolling on the right edge.

Despite this, It’s not that much of a dealbreaker for me, it’s okay once you get used to how the trackpad works. I find myself using a mouse most of the time though because of the scrolling, whenever I am at a desk.

Audio / Webcam / Microphone

Audio quality on the S10-3 is very, very good though volume doesn’t go very loud. Good enough for a small room without any other distractions like a TV.

Microphone quality is very good with the two apparent microphones located on the top speaker bezel. There is the usual option to reduce background noise, or employ both microphones in the HD control panel. Webcam quality on the other hand seems average and it is clearly a 0.3M webcam. At the default 640 x 480 resolution, image is blurry but when you reduce it down to a little sized image such as a portrait for twitter or something, quality looks fine.

There’s also Dolby Headphone technology on board for a better listening experience though headphones. I’ve used it on previous netbooks and it provides ‘fuller’ sound. It’s not a mind blowing difference but somehow I find it sounds slightly better.

Upgrades

Like all other Lenovo netbooks, you have access on the back to a single RAM slot (2GB max), the 2.5” SATA storage device, half size mini PCI-e slot for Wi-Fi and a full sized mini PCI-e slot for a 3G modem (not locked like on the S10-3t, though it still won’t work with the Broadcom HD card). There’s a SIM card slot behind the battery.

I have tried a Broadcom Crystal HD card in the 3G modem slot but Windows does not pick up the card at all. I see other others have reported problems with it as well.

The S10-3 is way ahead of most netbooks in terms of upgradability simply because most netbooks allow provide an access panel to RAM.

Battery Life

The Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3 comes with a 6-cell 48Wh, 10.8V battery. Being quite frugal with some light web browsing (lots of reading and no Flash, lowest brightness settings, Wi-Fi and BT on) I have reached 7 hours, 37 mins of battery life. At this point Windows put the machine into hibernation. Upon resuming hibernation (at 7% battery life default) I gained another 18 mins of battery life (7:55 total)

Battery Life	Test	Settings
7:37	Light web browsing (no Flash)	Power Saver, Wi-Fi / BT ON,  1-2 brightness notches, audio ON
7:06	Light web browsing (no Flash)	Balanced, Wi-Fi / BT ON,  1-2 brightness notches, audio ON
6:20	480p (DivX) video playback	Power Saver, Wi-Fi / BT OFF, 4/11 brightness, audio ON
5:14	720p (H.264) video playback	Power Saver, Wi-Fi / BT OFF, 4/11 brightness, audio ON

* Windows hibernates by default at 7% remaining battery life. Results don’t include that remaining figure.

Now let’s compare that to other netbooks:

Above average, though the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE beats it by 2 hours and the last generation Eee PC 1005HA beats it by almost an hour.

Performance

There’s not much to say about performance. When you’re comparing one Atom N powered netbook to another of the same variety they all feel the same unless one comes with a different speed HDD or SDD.

Lenovo provides their usual performance scaling app which is great and comprehensive as always. There are various power modes and the CPU scales from either 1GHz to 1.66GHz. There is no hardware key for switching power modes.

Here’s how the S10-3 fits in with some other netbooks and notebooks I have reviewed:

Windows 7 Starter returns a WEI score of 2.3:

HD Video

YouTube works well for 320p and 480p video but anything higher (720p and 1080p) is not watchable. H.264 / WMV videos, out of the box, work up to 480p, though with better performing codecs such as CoreAVC codec, 720p plays back smoothly though seeking to different parts of the video takes a little time.

There’s not enough power to playback 720p to a larger display. I tested 720p H.264 video on a 24” monitor at a 1680 x 1050 resolution and it almost played smoothly, just a tad jerky.

Noise

I haven’t heard a peep out of the S10-3. Very quiet, even when it’s being stressed. That might account for the slightly warm temperatures underneath but it’s a good tradeoff. At most there’s a very soft whirring of air heard around the vent if you put your head close by.

Heat

I left the S10-3 running for a couple of hours, on a wooden desk, and measured the temperatures. The top left feels slightly warm and the bottom, all over, feels extremely warm. Temperatures would be slightly hotter on a softer surface. Air pumping out of the vent is cool when felt by hand but the actual temperature at the vent is 42.4 C / 108.32 F.

Instant On OS

Pressing the power button on the left screen bezel launches Windows or whatever OS you have installed, but pressing the button on the right bezel will launch Lenovo’s Instant On OS, and it loads up very quickly. Just a little over 10 seconds from button press to OS desktop showing up. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried I could not get Wi-fi working so I could not test the OS out. It has definitely come a long way since I used it on the Lenovo S10e early last year. 

Linux Compatibility

I tested out Jolicloud on the S10-3 and it works great out of the box. Wi-Fi, brightness, sound, resume from standby all work out of the box. The only thing that did not work was the hotkey for Wi-Fi. This bodes extremely well for other Linux distros.

Size & Weight

Compared to my Samsung N140 netbook (or the average netbook), the S10-3 is wider but not as deep, overall thickness about the same, though the chassis is a little slimmer but the protruding battery adds to the thickness. The S10-3 weighs 1.17 kg / 2.6 pounds. The Samsung N140 weighs 1.21 kg / 2.7 pounds. I can slightly feel the weight difference.

Here are several photos comparing my Samsung N140 to the Lenovo S10-3:

 

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