The NVidia ION invasion begins with the new Lenovo IdeaPad S12

Yes, alternative-fans, the day has arrived! The first NVidia ION-based netbooks has been officially announced! It is the Lenovo IdeaPad S12, which will start selling at $500 when it comes out. This is a loaded netbook and it climbs upwards and tries to inch into laptop territory.

It's On Now!
While we've already seen a couple of single-core Celeron-based HP and Toshiba laptops selling for $350 and released in the modern era, the netbooks continue to try to enroach into laptop territory - at least in terms of price and good-enough-features.

The NVidia ION chipset is what promises to help netbooks to go, as the MadTV guy said, to a "whole nuther level". A price of $500 and weight of 3.7 pounds make this not exactly the typical netbook. However, the netbooks do not have to meet or beat the features and performance benchmarks of competing laptops of the same price range, but instead, they have to meet or exceed the performance expectations of the buyers at that price point.

In other words, if a significant number of consumers are happy with a $500 netbook that can do all their usual stuff (email, browsing, light work), along with basic multimedia (music, HD-Video, etc), and perhaps some basic entertainment, then these users could care less than the equivalent $500 Laptop model XYZ is 50% better at this benchmark and 150% better at that benchmark.

So, in other words, what we are trying to say, is that success for the ION-netbooks is not necessarily based on how they do versus the equivalent laptops, but rather, how what they do for consumers who are more demanding in terms of performance from their lovely netbooks.

IdeaPad S12 main specs
+ 12-inch display
+ NVidia ION
+ Atom N270
+ 1gb memory
+ 160gb hard disk
+ ExpressCard slot
+ HDMI
+ 6-cell battery
+ 3.7 pounds (ouch!)

Read all about the IdeaPad 12
+ real hands-on report at Laptop Magazine
+ Engadget - with computer pictures
+ lots of pictures at PC Perspective
+ brief hands-on with it at PC Magazine
+ Gotta Be Mobile
+ CrunchGear finds it promising
+ Liliputing
+ Gadget Lab (a Wired tech blog)
+ Techmeme