While you can pre-order the Lenovo S10, I can’t

Ideapads10

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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