By now you’ve probably seen all the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 pictures and videos you need to see to decide whether this is the mini-notebook for you. But hey, here’s one more.

Notebooks.com caught up with a Lenovo rep at the Intel Developer’s Forum in San Francisco yesterday and shot this little demo video. You get to see the S10 from all angles, and hear a few things you already knew, like the fact that the S10 will be available with Windows XP Home or Linux, but not Windows Vista or Windows XP Pro. At least not for now. Of course, if you’re in the US, Linux doesn’t appear to be an option at the moment either.

Intel has finally developed a version of the Classmate PC that I actually want to own. Granted, the Classmate PC and the Classmate 2 aren’t really designed for me or for you. They were designed for educational markets. But that hasn’t stopped companies like CTL from selling computers based on the Classmate design directly to consumers.

But the Classmate tablet PC or Classmate 3, or whatever it’s actually called (I’ve seen some conflicting reports about this), has many of the features you’ll find in commercial netbooks like the Asus Eee PC 901 or Lenovo IdeaPad S9 and then some. At its most basic level the computer Intel unveiled at IDF in San Francisco today has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, an 8.9 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, and a solid state disk. But it also features a touchscreen display, a rugged case, and an accelerometer.

In other words, you can grab this little laptop by the handle and toss it around a bit without fear of breaking it. You can rotate the screen 180 degrees and use your fingers or a stylus to interact with the PC. And Intel even added palm recognition that lets you rest your palm on the screen while using your fingers to click, write, or draw.

The webcam has been modified to rotate up to 180 degrees for use in tablet mode. And Intel has developed a full screen application launcher that works with Windows XP to make it easy to start commonly used programs with your fingertips. The program launcher actually looks a lot like the Asus Eee PC easy mode, or the interface for Linpus Linux Lite or Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

You can check out a few videos of the Classmate tablet in action after the jump. No word on pricing yet, but this device’ll probably cost at least a few bucks more than the current generation Classmate 2 which runs around $400. The Classmate tablet should be available by the end of the year.

Read the rest of this entry »

While I’m still waiting patiently for the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 I ordered yesterday to arrive, Joanna Stern at Laptop Magazine got to play with one for about 45 minutes at the IDF conference in San Francisco yesterday. (I’m pretty sure those hands in the picture belong to the Lenovo rep and not Joanna).

Her first impressions? The nearly full-sized keyboard is awesome, despite the awkward placement of the page up/down buttons at the top. The trackpad looks small, but is easy to use and supports vertical scrolling, unlike the new MSI Wind touchpad. And performance seems to be pretty decent despite the fact that the stock S10 will ship with just 512MB of RAM. The PC boots Windows XP in about 45 seconds.

I’d still be happier if Lenovo offered the option of RAM and battery upgrades during checkout. But it should be pretty easy to upgrade the RAM yourself, and I suspect we’ll see official and/or third party extended batteries popping up in no time.

Check out Laptop Mag’s blog for more pictures and a few videos.