Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Great keyboard, graphics are improved and HD videos look great.

Thumbs Down:

Low performance Atom N270 processor.

Inside the Trunk:

Power cables and software.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

The processor of the S12-2959 is Intel Atom N270 / 1.6 GHz, which has data bus speed of 533 MHz. Chipset type is NVIDIA ION has L2 cache of 512 KB, RAM 3 GB (not expandable) DDR2 SDRAM 667 MHz, hard drive is 320 GB SATA of 5400 rpm. Graphics card is NVIDIA ION Shared video memory (UMA)

4 in 1 card reader can read cards of Memory Stick Pro, SD Memory Card, MultiMediaCard and Memory Stick

The display is 12.1 inch TFT active matrix widescreen display which has resolution of 1280 x 800. The netbook has 1.3 mega pixel camera.

Connectivity ports include – 1 x Audio / video – HDMI, 1 x Display / video – VGA – 15 pin HD D-Sub (HD-15), 1 x Headphones – Output – Mini-phone stereo 3.5 mm, 1 x Microphone – Input – Mini-phone 3.5 mm, 1 x Network – Ethernet 10Base-T/100Base-TX – RJ-45, 3 x Hi-Speed USB – 4 pin USB Type A.

Other features include – Security lock slot (cable lock sold separately), Power-on password, Hard drive password , Administrator password. The netbook is powered by 6-cell lithium ion battery which has life of about 6 hours. The computer has Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium OS. The netbook comes with a 1 year warranty.

Soft wares include McAfee VirusScan Plus 2009 (30 days of virus definitions), Lenovo Energy Management, Lenovo OneKey Recovery, Windows Live Toolbar, Lenovo Quick Start, Lenovo VeriFace, Adobe Reader.

Razzle Dazzle:

This notebook looks a lot like Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 which we got in early 2009. The exteriors are all black plastic; the lid is again glossy so expect it to attract a lot of finger prints. The netbook looks attractive; it is in fact, closest a netbook can come to a laptop.

Inside Dope:

Nvidia announced that it would be making GPU for netbooks and we have been since waiting eagerly to see them. They are finally here and Lenovo is the first netbook to carry them. Nvidia is known to make graphic cards (great graphic cards, infact) so we expected this netbook to be good on graphics. This machine has a 3 GB of RAM, 320 GB hard drive and 256 MB discrete graphics card. On the software front, the bundled OS is Windows 7 Home Premium and Bluetooth. All this hardware is really mouth watering for a netbook but it drives up the cost.

If graphics aren’t important for you then a cheaper alternative for this is Toshiba T135-S1309 which has a 13 inch big screen. On positive side this notebook has solid design, great keyboard, bright screen and good sound. This laptop costs $650 where as HP Mini 311 Netbook which also has a Nvidia Ion processor is a lot cheaper at $399. We think IdeaPad is priced a bit too steep. There are two options of processor, Intel Atom N270 and Via Nano ULV. You must get the former for Nvidia’s Ion processor. If you are not keen on Ion processor then you can get a same configuration for $429 and the cheapest netbook with Ion costs $599.

Keyboard is one of the best parts of the machine; it is extremely comfortable to use and easy to type on. There are buttons for muting and volume control, quick start button that will launch Splashtop an instant OS. You can use this for browser, photo viewer and music player and it is used if you don’t want to use all the features and want a quick boot. But we prefer keeping a netbook on sleep mode and then waking it up when needed. This way you get to use all the features of the computer. There is a 1.3 MP webcam which is also used for face recognition and apart from this there is a button for data recovery.

The display of the netbook is 12.1 inch big and gives a resolution of 1280X800 pixels which is what you get in a screen of this size. A big screen gives you better video viewing, web browsing and a bigger resolution gives you more real estate on word processor documents and alike. The bigger screen and the great keyboard are great to use however it will add bulk to your backpack.

There are three USB ports on the sides of the computer which we don’t find on a netbook much. (usually there is just one or two). It also has Bluetooth.

The Ion processor gives you a faster computer, the effect will be clear when you run perform multi tasking or it will open up applications like iTunes or Photoshop faster. IdeaPad S12 was slow when compared to Toshiba Satellite T115-S1105 which has a single core processor. Toshiba’s netbook costs about $479 and it is up to you to decide whether you want to spend additional $200 for a bit more RAM, better hard drive and Ion processor.

Apart from the keyboard, graphics and games is something that would make you buy this notebook. You will have to stay behind the line though; you can’t stretch all the settings to maximum and then expect games with all the eye candy. We played Unreal Tournament 3 at modest resolution of 1200X800 pixels with all the graphic settings minimized and we got 16.5 fps of gameplay. You will go up to 21.2 fps if you further lower the resolution to 800X600 but the quality will be cheaper. HD videos look great on this computer owing to Nvidia’s product in the hard ware.

Nitty Gritty:

Lenovo IdeaPad S12-2959 is a netbook for light gaming and casual HD movie viewing. The hard ware put in is good but it doesn’t justify the $650 price tag. We would advise you to sacrifice this one and look elsewhere. It is not worth spending this much on a netbook.

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