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I looked at several brands of netbook before deciding on the Lenovo. I am very happy with my decision. While the keyboard is slightly smaller than other 10" netbooks, it is certainly usable with a little adjustment (I am a touch-typer). The only bothersome oddity is the right shift key, as others have mentioned. That being said, the feel of the keyboard is much better than others in my opinion. In addition a new model is out now (the S10-2) with a better keyboard layout.
The place where the Lenovo shines above others, in my opinion, is in its fit and finish. Others seem to lack the attention to detail that this model has. For example, the keyboard on the HPs (I saw this several times) is mounded up on the left side and the shiny plastic over the screen is rippled. Annoying. And a lot of times the Asus keyboards registered false (or no) keystrokes. The MSI Winds like to tip over backwards. But the Lenovo is pretty solidly built, and it looks tastefully subdued like a good business machine should. Pretty nice if that's your thing.
I found that it's processor and hard drive are plenty fast for me even with "only" 1 GB of RAM installed. But I'm not a gamer and don't care to watch videos on it, so I don't really push the limits. The screen is pretty nice and is the full 1024x600.
The model I received included the Splash Top quick boot OS. This allows you to boot an appliance-like OS which has a browser (a rebranded and stripped down Firefox 2) a media player and a few other tools. It's nice but it disables features like plugins for the browser, or the ability to download files, so there are limits to what you can do with it. Great if you want to check news & weather or quickly get directions on the way out the door.
If you're interested, here's how the hard drive was partitioned: 115 GB primary partition formatted FAT32 contained the Windows XP OS. I'm pretty sure FAT32 was chosen instead of the newer NTFS because it allows Splash Top to access media files you have obtained and stored using Windows. A second 30 GB partition formated NTFS shows up as drive D: in Windows, and there is a 3rd partition (hidden in Windows) used to store disk images for the One Key Restore system.
I wanted to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix, but the manual advises not to mess with the 115 or 15 GB partitions because it may cause the One Key Restore to stop working. So I decided to use part of the 30 GB partition to install Ubuntu. This actually seems to work out pretty well because Ubuntu has no problem easily accessing the FAT32 main partition natively. So you can store all your music, movies, photos and working files on this large partition and use them either in Windows or Ubuntu. Makes for a pretty good setup.
The install of Ubuntu was painless. Just follow the instructions on the Ubuntu site and it does pretty much the rest for you. Networking, sleep and hibernate, screen brightness and volume and all the other function keys worked without having to do any tweaking. Only the internal mic needs some help to get working, but instructions are available if you look for them on the web. The nice think about UNR is that it makes really good use of the limited screen area on these smaller computer. It also boots faster than Windows and seems generally snappier.
I would certainly recommend this model to anyone in the market for a netbook.
