The Lenovo S10 Netbook is here, count me in

The S10 is here, I ordered one yesterday and I'm psyched. The is Lenovo's just-released entry in the Netbook market. "Netbook" is a new term that's applied to cheap small laptops that run either Windows XP Home Edition or Linux. No Vista or OS X here (neither is cheap).

One reason Netbooks are cheap is that they are underpowered, by current standards. Yet, they have more than sufficient horsepower to do the things most people do most of the time.

I think Netbooks will drastically change the computing scene.

For some of us, they should make excellent secondary computers. For children, they could make great first computers. And, with prices starting at $325, Netbooks are almost an impulse buy. In contrast, the cheapest MacBook notebook costs $1,099. This may not be a good time to invest in Apple stock.

Netbooks are small, but I think people will find they are not so small as to be annoying.

The original Netbook, the Asus Eee had a 7-inch screen. It was wildly popular, but, to me, the screen was too small. Skype barely fit on the screen and Web pages required too much scrolling. Most Netbooks now have 9-inch screens, the S10 screen is 10.2 inches.

Another big thing to me about the S10 is the anti-glare screen. I'm wary that the glossy screens on the Acer Aspire One and the Dell Mini 9s may be a constant annoyance.

Keyboards are small too, roughly 80 percent to 90 percent of normal. The original Asus Eee keyboard was so small that I could barely type on it. My adult fingers just didn't fit. I haven't used the S10 yet, but if there ever was a company capable of making a good keyboard it's Lenovo. Their ThinkPads have excelled at keyboards for years. the S10 has a "decent-size keyboard (for a Netbook)". Wired "Touch-typing is as easy as it gets in this category."

The keyboard on the Acer Aspire One has gotten good reviews but the placement of the mouse buttons is said to be sub-optimal. I fear that might be a constant annoyance especially for someone using the computer where an external mouse is not an option, such as on their lap. Interestingly, the Dell Mini 9 dealt with the small size of the keyboard by doing away with the row of Fx keys along the top. I've seen adults criticize the new Asus Netbooks for the keyboard still being too small. The HP Mini-Notes are, but not enough else to make them serious contenders.

When CNET wrote about the S10 way back on September 25th (2 weeks is a long time in the Netbook world) the only available model was $439. Now, there is also a $399 model for sale at Lenovo.com. CNET's demo unit had 1GB of ram and a 160GB hard disk. My only choices yesterday were 512MB of ram and an 80GB hard disk. I've run Windows XP on many computers with 512MB of ram and found it perfectly acceptable.

The two available models differ only in price and color. The $399 model is white, the $439 one is red (more colors are on way). I opted for white. Interestingly, other Netbooks are not priced by color. Comparable Dell Mini 9s are the same price regardless of the color. Newegg sells comparable models of both the Acer Aspire One and the Asus Eee for the same price regardless of the color.