Lenovo planning Ideapad S20 netbook

News is that Lenovo’s latest form Ideapad series is S 20 netbook. Reported by Digitimes, though there is no official confirmation yet; Ideapad S20, like the earlier model, Ideapad S10, it will be powered by Intel’s N280 processor but the netbook will have a 12 inch display. It is good news for those who find keyboards of 9” netbooks too cramped.

There is fierce competition among the 10 inch netbooks and so everyone is coming up with 12 inch netbooks now. What these 12” netbooks are also doing is eating up the laptop market. With a bigger display and more keyboard space these netbooks offer, lesser and lesser people are going to buy a low end laptop now.

Coming back to Lenovo, Ideapad is their consumer oriented mini laptops. S20 is an upgrade to the Ideapad S10, thus will be very similar. The build quality should be good as expected of Lenovo. The netbook will have a 12 inch LCD, backlit display. The S20 netbook will come with 1.66 GHz, Intel’s Atom N280 CPU and GN 40 chipset and loaded with Windows XP. The Ideapad S10 netbook had usual ports; BGA, Ethernet, headphone, mic, and 4 in 1 card reader. It had two USB ports, one lesser than normally given. It remains to be seen whether S20 will have three USB ports. Given, S20’s increased size; the keyboard is bound to be spacious.

Since it means that this would go against the Intel’s restrictions which state that netbooks can not be bigger than 10 inch, Lenovo will not get the preferential pricing which other vendors of 10 inch netbooks get and Lenovo will have to pay 10 $ premium for Atom chips. This decision of 12” netbook may surprise many but it may be because the competition is growing in the 10 inch category. In fact, this year itself Dell was the first one to come out with its Mini 12 netbook. Soon Samsung followed with its own 12 inch netbook but it is using Via Technologies chip instead of Intel. Looks like companies are trying to find a middle ground between very small netbooks and bigger laptops and most of the companies are going for 11 and 12 inch size screens.

The netbook will be priced at approximately $586 which is higher compared to Asus EEE PC 1004 DN, its direct competitor, which has N280 and Intel GN 40 chipset and t a much lesser price $ 379. No details yet about its availability.