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Written by Sasa Pantelic
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Monday, 18 May 2009 |
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Page 1 of 3  Netbook fever is at its peak and new models are presented, almost, on weekly basis. This time we present you Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook. Although IdeaPad should be more vanguard series than ThinkPad series, Lenovo design of S10e cannot be described as excitable. Lenovo S10e is black “squarish” shaped, with kind of “neutral” looks which some will appreciate. We could say that it looks like some ThinkPad models and maybe this was the main idea of Lenovo designers.
Although Lenovo IdeaPad S10e has good build quality it cannot be compared to build quality of ThinkPad series. When designing S10e, Lenovo’s designers decided to avoid current trends by not using piano finish surfaces which is a plus. Construction is firm and only place where (minimal) bending is noticeable is upper edge of palm rest. Keyboard is good with minimal bending and it is one of the best keyboards that we saw on netbooks so far. Keyboard layout is slightly changed, so key “ ~ ” is moved to the Function key row. There is no F12 key but it’s replaced with Fn and F11 key combination.
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Touch pad is completely different story. Although it is very precise we never saw smaller touch pad. The fact is that all netbooks have small touch pads, but this looks as some kind of a joke. To make things interesting Lenovo used a touch pad with multi-touch technology (two fingers can be used when operating with touch pad). So if you want to zoom a picture, for an example, you should move two fingers away one from each other. Which is nice, but now we have a problem. To zoom picture we have to move fingers 3-4 times because zoom amount is directly proportional to a distance that both fingers are moved. Thing are even worse for users with “big” fingers. Also touch pad keys are noisier from what we have used to, so this is another minus.
Above keyboard are two additional buttons. Button with orange back arrow is for launching application that shows shortcuts to 9 most frequently used applications. Six of them are predefined, while 3 can be customized. Second button is used as wireless switch. On front side are two speakers of average quality. Webcam has good picture quality but low frame rate.
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