Digital Home Thoughts: Lenovo Unveils The Ideapad S12

"We've seen NVIDIA's Ion placed within a nettop, a motherboard, and now (at long last), a laptop. Yep, the machine you're inevitably peering at above (Lenovo's S12) is both the company's first 12.1-inch netbook and the planet's first netbook with Ion baked in, and it's likely just a snippet of the kind of material we can expect to see at Computex."

I have recently been of two minds about netbooks, nettops and their kin. One the one hand, I'm thrilled to see ultra-portables sell for a friendly price point despite what it did to the resale value of my Fujitsu P1610. Then on the other hand, with the sheer popularity of netbooks, it has set the expected computing and graphics horsepower for a typical computer pretty low to the point of stagnation. While it does not boost the CPU itself, NVIDIA ION at least puts a respectable amount of graphics capabilities in a netbook. The Lenovo Ideapad S12 looks pretty nice and includes a lot of the regular netbook connectors. Notable is the 12 inch screen, which seems to push it out of netbook country as 10 inch screens seems to be the sweet spot. The attraction for me is that this is the first netbook to have the ION setup, which makes this a far more well rounded portable, and my netbook of choice. Anyone else disappointed with the graphics performance of netbooks?