Lenovo Ideapad S10 Netbook Full Evaluation
Power Consumption and Battery
The rear of the notebook is kept completely clean, as it is occupied by the system's three-cell Lithium Ion battery. This battery pack delivers about three and a half hours of power with the most aggressive power saving settings. If you want to run the system at its highest performance settings with the screen on full brightness, that figure will get cut down to roughly two and half hours of battery life. Not terrible, but certainly not great either. Currently, Lenovo does not offer larger battery options either, so all S10 users will be stuck with the standard three-cell Lithium Ion unit at this time. Not surprisingly, Lenovo does not like to tout their battery life numbers on their website.
;) Removable 3-Cell Battery |
;) A/C Adapter |
The A/C Adapter which Lenovo bundles with the IdeaPad S10 isn't the most discrete of bricks we've seen to date. While ours looks particularly striking due to the different colored power cables, we've been assured that finalized shipping versions will have the same color of these two cables. While the power brick size and shape are adequate, we're less than thrilled with the very high-volume noise which you receive when you unplug the A/C adapter while the system is running. It's not very pleasant.
With that said, the IdeaPad S10's power brick is fairly small, and Lenovo provides generous length cabling, so you should be able to route the power cabling to be mostly out of sight.
We were curious of the power consumption of the Lenovo IdeaPad S10, so we ran a set of numbers between one of the S10's competitors, the Asus 1000H, which has the same Atom CPU, GPU, and screen size. Here's what we saw.
 |
Things to take away from the numbers. At a 10" screen size, we see virtually no difference in power draw between these two netbooks. We are guessing that since so many different netbooks are based on these same core components, many notebooks of this class will show similar power consumption.
Both are absolutely exceptional in terms of overall power draw. Running a full-fledged (mildly powerful) computing platform in the palm of your hand running at a maximum wattage level as a dim lightbulb.
