14 DAY TRIAL // As we were telling you yesterday, the avalanche of cheap Windows 8 laptops with Chromebook-reminiscent specs has officially kickstarted.
A day ago we brought you news of the ASUS Vivobook F200MA, and today another major device manufacturer has made official an economic notebook that will fill the Windows 8 void in your life.
Lenovo has just outed the IdeaPad S20-30 which comes in two variations and with prices starting from €249 / $335. When the new machines are going to hit the US shores, they are probably going to be marketed for less.
As MiniMachines notes, the reason Lenovo is asking for so little for these devices is that the notebooks come with Windows with Bing out of the box. This means that Bing is the default search engine onboard as can be seen with the ASUS VivoBook F200MA and Acer Aspire ES1.
Anyway, as we have already told you, the specs are quite identical to what can be found in several Chromebook models. It’s only the operating system onboard that differs.
The IdeaPad 20-30 arrives with an 11.6-inch screen and offers the standard resolution on the market, meaning 1366 x 768 pixels. Under the hood lies an Intel Celeron N2830 Bay Trail-T processor that is fitted with a 500GB hard drive.
The laptop is quite portable and weighs only 1.3kg / 2.8 lbs in league with the bulk of most Chromebooks out there. It benefits from a full AccuType keyboard, characteristic of Lenovo, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI out, audio jack and mic combo, SD card reader but also an RJ-45 plug for connecting to wireless networks.
Moreover, there’s 10/100 LAN, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a 720p frontal webcam. What we have outlined so far represents the basic version of the IdeaPad 20-30, but Lenovo is giving users a choice to bump some of the specs up, of course for a heftier price tag.
The more advanced version comes with a touch screen, 4GB of RAM (instead of just 2GB) out of the box. Both variants have a battery that should provide users with 5 hours of work time on the lappy. The more advanced version will retail for €299 / $402.
Microsoft has been feeling threatened by Google’s Chromebooks for quite some time now, so its high time the tech giant took some action, beside trying to blatantly bash the devices every chance it got.
The Windows 8 with Bing notebook strategy is a follow-up of the similar tablet one as Microsoft hopes to gain more market share in the process.
