14 DAY TRIAL // The past two weeks have been packed with various product launches. Desktops have debuted, laptops made their way to various parts of the world and even more unusual machines, such as dual-touchscreen, keyboardless laptops, have made their presence known. Now, from this veritable chaos, Lenovo has emerged to reestablish the link with the past, so to speak, by officially announcing the availability of a certain computer that was first unveiled back in May.
The product, a very thin nettop, goes by the name of IdeaCentre Q150 and has now shown up as available for order on the websites of online retailers. Two versions are, at present, available and differ from each other in several ways. The presence, or lack thereof, of the NVIDIA ION GPU is the main distinctive trait, though not the only one. Lenovo chose this path in order to address the needs of two separate consumer segments simultaneously.
The full-featured Q150 has a dual-core Intel Atom D510 at its heart, which operates at 1.66GHz and is backed up by 2GB of RAM. A 250GB HDD is present, as is the NVIDIA ION graphics solution. The GPU itself has 512MB of dedicated memory and communicates with display solutions via the nettop's HDMI output. The machine also integrated LAN, 802/11 b/g/n WiFi and the ability to playback full HD videos (1080p quality).
The less powerful incarnation of the IdeaCentre Q150 runs Windows XP instead of the other's Windows 7 and, as already mentioned, lacks the NVIDIA ION. This nettop also has a different CPU (1.66GHz Atom D410 single-core), only 1GB of RAM, a 160GB HDD, WiFi and 10/100 Ethernet.
The Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150, both the less magnificent and the fully-equipped versions, have already shown up on their very own order pages on Amazon, priced at $220 and $350, respectively.