Which is the Best ION netbook? Between ASUS 1201N, Lenovo S12, HP Mini 311 and Samsung N510
Here is the comparison of the top four ION netbooks that are available right now – ASUS Eee PC 1201N, Lenovo IdeaPad S12, HP Mini 311 and the Samsung N510. So, which is the best amongst them – let’s find out
Price comparison:
Asus eee 1201N – $499.99
Lenovo Ideapad S12 – $649.00
HP Mini 311 – $474.99
Samsung N510 – $599.99
Design
Design-wise, all of them looked the same except for HP Mini 311. Asus, Lenovo and Samsung have glossy lids that are also finger-print magnets. HP’s lid did not catch any smudge.
Asus 1201N and Lenovo Ideapad S12 have 12.1-inch screens while the other two have 11.6-inch display.
Keyboard:
All the netbooks are bigger than the usual 10-inch netbooks that one see around. Thanks to the bigger frame, they all are able to pack excellent keyboards.
Though Asus has been adopting chiclet keys in their recent netbooks including this one, the keys felt flimsy. You will not find Sony Vaio X quality here
Lenovo and Samsung have excellent keyboards. Lenovo is recommended, thanks to the angled black keys.
Performance:
Performance-wise, the Asus 1201N is the fastest all due its dual-core Atom 330 processor. All of the other netbooks came with a single core Atom processor – either Atom N270 or Atom N280. I may sound a bit blunt when I say this, but single core Atom processors are just not recommended for handling higher resolution displays.
Graphic performance was great on all netbooks, thanks to Nvidia ION chipset present on all of them. Here again, the performance of Asus 1201N was better due to its dual core Atom CPU.
Battery Life:
ION eats a lot of your netbook’s battery juice. With higher performance comes poor battery life too. Even though all the netbooks come with 6-cell batteries, none of them possessed more than 4 hour of runtime. Asus and Lenovo could not even touch the 3 hour mark. The best was the HP Mini 311 sporting 3 hour 53 minute of run time.
Bottom Line
These $500+ ION-netbooks seem to be missing the point. For that price, one can easily get a nice CULV netbook like Acer Aspire 1410 or 1810 that performs much better than aforementioned netbooks except for the fact that it cannot play games like WoW at 30FPS. Battery life is also not as great as Aspire 1810 which has 7+ hours of run time.
We would suggest the users to wait for some more time for the ION-2 equipped netbooks.
Read Acer 1410 review
[via engadget]
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