Lenovo follows HP, drops netbook prices by $50

Does the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 netbook make your short list of portable device contenders? When we looked at the netbook, we liked what we saw: aside from the standard netbook features common to most, it offers a multi-touch trackpad, and the OneKey Rescue System that restores the factory new smell in a jiffy. Lenovo might be playing a game of "follow-the-leader" here because they just dropped pricing for the S10 by $50 across the board. This follows the $40 HP Mini 1000 price cut from earlier in the week, but to be honest, it doesn’t matter who did it first. In the end, the consumer wins. Unfortunately, even the $50 savings can’t make me overlook the small right-Shift key that’s not in the right place. A hundred bucks off might get me to look the other way when typing, though.

Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10 product page offers two main models: one for "general computing" now starting at $349 and one in a "large capacity" now priced at $399. The main difference? An 80GB hard drive and only 512 MB of RAM for the lower priced unit; double both of those specifications on the higher priced model. Both come with Windows XP Home pre-installed. Perhaps the price cut will help Lenovo gain additional market share in the netbook space. At last check, Lenovo had a lowly 0.7% of the market, while HP owned 5% of it even before their recent price cut. Of course, it’s also in HP’s favor that they jumped into the netbook market months before Lenovo with the HP Mini-note 2133 back in the spring.

(via Laptoping)