Lenovo S10 IdeaPad

My wife has got this Lenovo S10 IdeaPad netbook and I sometimes “borrow” it, esp. in the evenings when I turn off my computer. It’s so much easier to keep this small computer on the lap when lying in the bed. Is got great wifi, much better than my HP530 notebook, so having Internet access is great.

I really don’t want and don’t like to boot into Windows, so I just select to go into that minimal Linux environment available at boot time. It’s great way to browse the web safely. Lenovo has a nice Firefox ripoff named Splashtop Browser. One of the mail things I’m missing in it, is the options menu. For example, you cannot change the homepage, so whenever browser is started, it goes to Lenovo’s website. I guess they like to have stats - how many copies of Splashtop Browser get started each day.

Another thing Lenovo did, is made sure Firefox makes no money from Google when using Lenovo netbooks. Money goes to Lenovo instead. Average user won’t even notice it, but if you use the browser’s search box in top-right corner, you can clearly see that search is “powered by google” and plugs into AdSense directly. Now, I don’t mind where the money goes, but custom AdSense linked search lacks important features that are otherwise available. Most important being: “image” search. You simply cannot switch to search for images, you need to go to www.google.com yourself. That sux Lenovo!

Firefox does this much better: they made a deal with Google, so when you search from Firefox, all is ok, you get the full featured interface. On the other hand, it seems that Lenovo did not want to make deals with Google (or couldn’t?), so they just opened an AdSense account and linked that into the browser. Who knows, maybe even Lenovo is unaware of this and some of their developers is getting hoards of money. Now, these are the issues I’d like to ask some Lenovo representative about if I even get a chance to have an interview once. But don’t worry Lenovo, it’s not like that going to happen, ever.

Another interesting thing is battery meter. Just a few minutes ago I got a warning message saying something like: “battery running low, you have one minute left”. About 3 seconds later, system turned off. Nice estimation Lenovo :)

If I was typing a lengthy e-mail these 3 seconds will probably not be enough to scroll down and save it. So, once you see the battery going red, get a hold on a power supply quickly.

One more thing I don’t like about this minimal Linux environment is that integrated touchpad does not support advanced actions: drag&drop and scrolling (when moving a finger along the right edge). Those do work in Windows, so I assume Lenovo forgot to configure something. As there is no access to terminal, there’s really no way to see “under the hood” or try to fix it.

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2009-10-05