While you can pre-order the Lenovo S10, I can’t
As I catch up on a week’s worth of RSS feeds, I see from Liliputing that the Lenovo Ideapad S10 order page is up and running. I just hit it up and see that you can pre-order a red, white or blue black unit starting at $429 for black and an other $10 for red or white. All of these are XP units, which explains the additional cost: the original press release indicated pricing at $399 and up, so clearly that cost was for a Linux unit.
I know that many folks are placing orders now that the netbook has seen the light of day with LAPTOP Magazine’s hands-on and the Notebooks.com video. As much as I would like to get my hands on the S10, I’m going to pass. I can already tell you that I’ll likely pass on the Dell netbook that’s expected to surface in the news tomorrow as well. And one of the may Eee PC models? They’re all gone from my wish-list as well at this point.
Using the Acer Aspire One got me to realize that I have a veryspecific requirement from a netbook, one that I alluded to in a priorcomment, but now I’ll point it out front-and-center. All of thenetbooks I crossed off my list have one item in common: a smallRight-Shift key in a non-standard placement on the keyboard. Yup, I’mbeing picky here, but this aspect challenged me with the original EeePC and after using the Acer, I know this this a requirement for me. The Acer does have a full sized Right+Shift key in the proper placement and it’s a much more enjoyable typing experience as a result.
Plenty of people will happily overlook this need; I know it’s apersonal requirement for me. However, I’ve always felt that if you’regoing to add weight and space with a keyboard, it ought to be ano-compromise bit of hardware. It’s why I almost never use thethumb-board on my Q1UP to be honest. If these are companion devices, Iwant them to have the same general keyboarding that my main device has,i.e.: I don’t feel I should have to change how I physically type whenalternating between my main and companion device. As I said… I’mbeing picky, but I just can’t give in on that requirement. ;)
More to follow the Acer Aspire One as I did install Windows XPyesterday while Barb was resting. First impressions: I’m not too happywith the performance due to the slow SSD data transfer rates.
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Kevin,
I’m ready to pull the trigger on the Acer Aspire One with the 120gb harddrive and XP pre-installed. Do you feel the sluggish response is solely due to the SSD, meaning the 1.6 Atom processor can handle XP fine with a conventional harddrive? Thanks for the review (and the right shift key has been one of the main determining factors for me too). Typing speed is dependent on hitting the shift and not the up arrow as on some other keyboards.
The Wind has 34 mm left and 30 mm right shift. I checked the several keyboards that i have hooked up in my cube. The wear marks on all of my keyboards are within those specs. The Dell D630 in have, has a 52mm right shift. Its that big just for fill the space under the Enter key. I never noticed it, but every keyboard has an extra 10 mm on the right shift to fill the space under the Enter key.
I used Win XP on my primary 1.4 Ghz CPU desktop for 4 years. I would expect a state-of-the-art 1.6 Ghz CPU to easily handle XP. Heck, I would expect it to handle Vista. Is that too much to expect?
@Gabe: MSI Wind, Asus 1000, etc, running XP fine with the same Atom and overall guts. It’s the SSD in the Acer. It’s baaaad slow.
So Kevin, gonna do a tnkgrl-like HD implant?
Kev, nope the S10 has been said by Lenovo from the press release that we covered that there will not be a Linux version of the S10, that there will be a 9-inch Linux version offered outside of the US only. Looking back at our original post it clearly states that the two models of the S10, $399 & $429 will both run XP. The difference is 512 MB/80 GB vs 1 GB/160GB of memory/HDD.
http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/08/mini-notebook-o.html
Scott_H : The MSI Wind I have runs Xp flawlessly. It even runs Office 2007 very quickly at about a 2 second load time. I am willing to guess if it had to read from an extremely slow storage location it might take some time, especially if it had to write anything to a page file. If I had an Aspire I would think about adding a second GB of RAM and disabling the page file. I would expect to see a performance boost. I have disabled the page file to squeeze out a little extra run time from my 3 cell battery. I didn’t notice any performance change, but then again everything was already running pretty fast.
I’ve been playing around with several different OS installs on my EEE PC 4G. I tried XP and several flavors of Ubuntu that were all customized for the EEE PC or small devices. After trying each, I keep going back to the default Xandros install. Why? I’m only going to use this device for web surfing, email, and light work. I can do what I need to do using the installed apps. The flash drive is too small to load a bunch of programs and data anyway, and it’s just not the device I’d just for longer work sessions. The default Xandros install suits these needs and doesn’t add extra overhead to slow things down.
Gabe, Mike is correct: the 1.6 GHz Atom can easily handle XP; the slow SSD is the bottleneck.
Mike: there’s little to no point in my modding to add a traditional hard drive. It would make more sense to me for the extra $20 to get the XP model with hard drive and extra 512 MB of memory.
James, I know what the PR said on the Lenovo S10, but take a look at the pre-order page: all of the S10 models at $429 and $439 have the 512 MB RAM / 80 GB hard drive configuration. An XP model with 1 GB RAM / 160 GB drive will certainly cost more. Given that they’ve changed from the original PR, it wouldn’t surprise me to see them offer a Linux model when they said they wouldn’t.
Kevin: I just received my Aspire One w/Linux. It rocks although I think I will also get the Dell 910 w/SUSE Linux. I specifically chose the Aspire One Linux model because I knew that XP would be too slow even on the HD model. And, it will only get slower over time as the monolithic registry goes and all those anti-malware apps get larger and larger databases to check through.
I have had the Aspire One with XP for about a week. It is not sluggish due to the HD. It runs quite nicely. It is not as fast as my HP 6120 with a Pentium M and 1.5GB memory but it is very nicely done.
it will make a very nice mobile device for my traveling needs
..wiley
NW Harris County
I have an XP Aspire One with the HDD. It is the fastest netbook I have used to date. I also have a Fujitsu U810 and an EEE PC 4G w/ 2GB RAM.
@Todd:
Just this morning it was easily handling my Cisco 3000 VPN, 6 RDP sessions, Citrix, VMWare Virtual Infrastructure Client, Outlook 2007, Firefox w/ 5 tabs, IE 7, Adobe Acrobat PDF reader, MSN Live Messenger, and My ITSM Ticketing Client.
I am pleasantly surprised at the performance of the Atom, it even runs WoW at ~15fps which was not expected at all.
I am going to toss the Kubuntu 8.04 remix on here sometime to see if linux is appreciably better but I doubt it will be.
The larger right shift key is something I didn’t notice till I read it here and it really is faster and I make less mistakes.
Doesn’t appear that the 6-cell battery is an option yet, or did I miss it?
This is the exact same reason my choices were pretty much narrowed down to the MSI Wind and Acer Aspire One. I’ve been using a Fujitsu P2040 for many years which does have the small right shift key which still bothers me to this day. With the specs of all these netbooks pretty much the same, it’s going to come down to personal preferences like these. I’ll have my AAO on Fri and I’m looking forward to using it.
Kevin, the Aspire One is really snappy with my 60 GB 1.8″ PATA hard drive upgrade (and the 1.5 GB RAM helps too).
i really want the Lenovo, but why do i get the feeling they are pulling another bait & switch like MSI WInd has with their 6-cell batteries? samething that Acer is doing right now. no way in hell i want to get stuck with a device that has 3 cell battery until some next year or maybe even permanently. i feel sorry for you guys that bought the Lenovo on the hopes that the 6-cell is going to appear, you really should have waited. theres a long list of OEM’s in front of Lenovo STILL waiting for their 6-cell orders to be fulfilled.
problem is, there is quite a big battery shortage in the industry. the OEM’s could produce 6-cell batteries very easily, but only half as many as the 3-cell. which would mean less netbooks on the market which means less profit for the OEM’s. so dont believe them when they say they cant do it, it’s actually that they wont do it.
as of right now it looks like Asus 9xx/1xxx series are the best all arounders, YUCK!
Kevin, a program like keytweak can easily remap a key to function how you like, rendering their silly shift key placements moot. On my EEE 1000h, I changed the “up arrow” key to be a “shift” key and vice versa, and have been happily typing normally ever since. Going up a page sometimes can be annoying but otherwise no complaints.
The shift key is, as you mention Kevin, quite a pet peeve for those who use their netbooks to type and don’t want to deviate from the ergonomics of their regular keyboards.
However, I’m kind of missing the point here why you didn’t make the jump on the HP mininote if the keyboard is the determining factor in your netbook purchase.
For me, I would choose the HP mininote over the Acer for the following reasons:
1. Build quality – magnesium alloy frame is always going to be more durable than plastic, especially if it helps act as a giant heatsink.
2. Screen – 1280 across is better for work than 1024 and let’s me see more without having to scroll.
3. Hard drive – the luxury of using a 2.5″ size drive gives me capacity and speed that smaller devices just cannot match, and it is easily user-replaceable. And remember, 320GB of WMV movies beats any portable DVD player.
4. PC card slot – for many people this is simply a “must-have” requirement and the ultimate deal-breaker. And I’m not just talking about mobile web cards that may already be deployed in corporate use. You open up the options for “new” ports (think USB 3.0), firewire 800, serial ports, GBE, eSata connections, TV tuners etc…
Finally, I have to mention the price. $399 gets you an Acer with XP. $579 gets you the HP with Vista.
Are all the bells and whistles I mention worth the extra $180??? That is the real question here. For some, the pc card slot may be worth it alone. For me, I feel these details combined are worth the extra $180.
While I like HP, I’m not an HP fanboy. I’ve been using netbooks for five years now and cannot emphasize their benefits to everyone who I show my old Fujitsu P1120 to.
Just my $0.02
@Luscious: while those are all good arguments for the 2133, what kills it is running Vista with a C7. I really hope HP gets its act together and drops in an Atom, or at least a Nano.
I wholeheartedly agree with the non-standard right shift being a dealbreaker. I bought an eeepc 701 without realizing how annoying this would become. Sure, you can remap the Up and right shift keys. But now you have a non-standard arrow key arrangement. I touch type ALL the keys so this really eliminated Lenovo, Asus, and Dell from my next netbook purchase. It’s the MSI Wind or Acer Aspire One for me.
I never knew that many people used the right shift key. For me, it’s the one key I never use (sometimes I’ll hit the Pause/Break button for the “any key”)!
Kevin, as you said win xp performance with the SSD is not so good. I got some improvement by formatting it FAT32 but I’ve just ordered a 5mm Samsung 1.8″ 60GB HD and I’ll go for the tnkgrl HD mod as soon as it arrives.
stv
I can sympathize with you Kevin. That’s why I stopped using a slate tablet PC. Although it wasn’t only the right shift key I found annoying. :)
I use the left mouse button more than I use the right shift key – and the mouse buttons on a few of the mini-notebooks (including the One) are wonky. Forget it!
Before getting an HP laptop I’d make sure it didn’t have a Synaptics touchpad. My employer has one of these that I’ve been allocated and the touchpad is unbelievably twitchy — it often decides that I really meant to click on something if I hover over it. Which means I have to figure out, OK, what did I do there, what does this program think I wanted, and now, how do I undo it? I know that there’s a “tap to click” feature with a lot of touchpads, it’s supposed to be helpful and convenient, and maybe on some machines, for some people, that works great, but it absolutely drives me nuts, and I avoid working on that machine if I can. And when I do, having to be extra, extra careful with all GUI navigation is very distracting — fortunately I spend a lot of time in an editor that doesn’t depend on mucking with the pointer much.
There appears to be no way to modify this behavior; there are postings on HP’s web site from people complaining about this problem, but no response from HP, or anyone else, about what to do about it.
Your mileage may vary.
Henry, I know that you can remap keys (see the last link in my post), but that doesn’t solve the key sizing issue for me. I could compromise on it if I have to, but I’d prefer not to.
Luscious, all good points, but they underscore a more important one that we make here time and time again: the “P” in “PC” stands for “Personal”, meaning we all have different computing needs. Examples: you prefer a hard drive with higher capacity storage, while I like to work with data in the cloud and don’t need more than a few gigs of capacity. The PC Card slot on the HP is appealing to you; I prefer USB ports for the peripherals I own. I’ve been using 800X480 and 1024×600 displays for 2.5 years, so I’m comfortable with them… 1280 wide would be nice, but it’s low on my priority list, etc….. Again, all very good points in your comment, but we all have differing requirements.
>>>It would make more sense to me for the extra $20 to get the XP model with hard drive and extra 512 MB of memory.
Yeah, but you ALREADY OWN IT, so why not just add the HD to it? Or would you ebay it and get the XPed HDed one? Or pass it on to your kid and then buy the XP one? Feh, you rich people! Money to burn! (ROTF…)
I have never, ever used modifiers on the right side of the keyboard, desktop, laptop, netbook, or phone.
You’re an iPhone user too.. Does the lack of two shift keys bother you on that keyboard? You’re clearly adapting when you use the iPhone and it’s clear that it’s perfectly usable.. At least, for me.
I guess I agree that specs and build quality would matter a lot more to me than if it had a non standard keyboard layout. I own a full-size laptop with a non standard layout and just didn’t find it a problem.
I think you certainly are being picky!
Mike, I purchased the Acer knowing full what what the return policy is, so while I own it now, I can still return it.
Alan, I don’t “touch-type” on any phone be it the iPhone or not. Comparing the typing ergonomics and approach of a phone and a computer with a nearly-full size keyboard doesn’t make sense to me.
Kev – is there a site or some place that i can compare and contract all the netbooks available; so i know what my choices are?? thanks
>>>I think you certainly are being picky!
It’s his money, so why not?
Kevin,
I just stumbled across this post of yours. Interestingly, I posted an article on my blog (ulpcs.com) on the same day as you. I titled mine “Arrgh! Give Me Full-Size Shift Keys!”.
My conclusions were the same as yours, any netbook without this feature is no longer under consideration.
I also noted that Dell and Lenovo had blown it.
I hope the marketing folks are taking notice…
By the way, great blog.