Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10 Netbook was one of the most well loved budget mininotebooks for excellent reasons: its business-friendly tools, ExpressCard slot, and reasonable price all made it a fantastic option for consumers or corporate users.

When we last visited the S10 in May, the addition of a six-cell battery fixed our gripe about the small battery life of the previous version. Now, another revision is available that effectively replaces the S10–the S10-2. This new model has some physical changes–most excellent, a couple terrible–but keeps the same general components at a reduced price. It’s a better deal than previous models, but you’ll have to live without one key feature.

As far as the main body goes, the S10-2 is thin: so thin, in fact, that we’d be hard-pressed to want anything thinner. But, while the Netbook closes up into a clean package, the six-cell battery protrudes out the back and hangs off the rear hinge like a laptop riser that can’t be place away. Maybe it’s the Netbook’s new thinness, but the dangling battery seems more intrusive here. We’d like to see that battery folded into the chassis, somehow, in future versions–it’s just plain unsightly and also gets in the way of packing the Netbook flat into sleeves or cases. It does, but, make for a nice stand on a desk.

With a matte-black interior and keyboard, a glossy 10.2-inch screen, and a smudge-collecting glossy black exterior with a black-on-black polka-dot pattern, the design feels a bit lost between business and consumer. It also looks a small more like an Acer or Asus than a “pro model” Netbook, if we can use such a term.

The keyboard is comfortably responsive and has excellent travel, but the feel is still shrunken-down from a full-size keyboard experience. The multitouch Synaptics trackpad is adequate and has average buttons beneath it, but getting finger-scrolling to work is a frustrating exercise. While the keyboard has been improved with full-size shift keys and a larger, wider set of tapered keys, it still doesn’t approach the comfort of a ThinkPad keyboard, or even the HP Mini 110′s fuller-size keys.

A quick-start button above the keyboard launches a Splashtop Linux-based instant-on OS if pressed when the power’s off. The functionally limited Web browser, music player, photo viewer, Flash-based game player, and Skype/chat options are decent, but still take time to boot up (although less than booting XP). We’d prefer to place XP in standby and just resume when needed. When not running Splashtop, the QS button can be customized as a hot key to launch apps within Windows XP.

The 10.2-inch wide-screen show has a 1,024×600-pixel native resolution, which is standard for 10-inch Netbooks. The new glossy screen looks stylish, but attracts light much more than the S10′s. Video, including 720p clips, look clean and bright, though. Stereo speakers are positioned on the bottom of the S10-2, projecting sound but sounding muffled because of their positioning. They’ll suffice for basic listening, but we recommend headphones.

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1. Lenovo ThinkPad X100e Review Delivered with Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit or Windows 7...

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Delivered with Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit or Windows 7 Professional 32-bit, this ultraportable computer is powered by an AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor running at 1.6 GHz, and 4 GB of DDR2 667 MHz memory.

It comes with a rear lit 11.6 inch LED show powered by an ATI Radeon HD 3200 video card with VGA output, a speaker system linked to a high definition audio circuit and networking options including Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi n chipsets. For data, the device comes with a SATA hard drive running at 5400 RPM, with storage capacity of up to 320 GB. A 4-in-1 memory card reader is also present.

For the rest, we note that there are three USB 2.0 ports, although only one is powered, while the device also comes with Bluetooth as an option. A combo audio port for the headset and microphone, a VGA webcam for video conferencing, a multipoint tactile pad and digital fingerprint reader round out the devices options.

To power this system, a 2600 mAh, 6 cell Lithium-Ion battery is present providing up to 5 hours of battery life.
 
On Lenovo’s site, the ThinkPad X100e is being sold for $584.

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