The Lenovo S210 Touch is a great laptop. It's well-designed, adequately powered and has a very responsive touch screen. If only it had better battery life and, more importantly, a responsive keyboard, this could have been a great laptop, one that we would have blindly recommended to anyone in the market for an 11-inch notebook.
The dimensions are actually quite comfortable to work on and the device is very portable given its low weight and if that’s all you want from a laptop, the S210 is an excellent choice. There are some issues that we’ll be talking about later on, but let’s talk about the build quality for now.
Design and build
The shell is made from some sort of plastic with a matte finish, which makes the surface comparatively grippy, lending greater confidence to anyone who’s carrying the device. The device itself is quite slim and while the monitor and lid segment is quite thick, that’s only because the device features a touch-screen.
The keyboard is the standard Lenovo keyboard with island style keys that we’ve come to love and the touchpad is just that, a simple touchpad with independent buttons for the left and right click. The touchpad area is a little small, but it’s adequate for a device of this size.
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Fitting a battery into this form factor might seem to be a daunting task, but Lenovo’s worked around that issue by designing a battery as tall as the device is thick and allowing it to protrude a bit. The way the laptop is designed, you won’t notice the bulge with the lid closed and it’s definitely not unsightly with the lid open.
Features
The laptop is quite light on features, you get the standard webcam, HDMI, LAN, SD Card. 3.5mm jack combo, but what you miss out on are the DVD drive and a profusion of USB ports. You only get two USB ports on the device, only one of which is a USB3.0 port.
You have two, tiny LED indicators for power and charging (separate indicators), but nothing for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The device is powered by an Intel i3 CPU and 4GB RAM, adequate for your day-to-day usage and definitely not for even mild gaming.
Performance
Judging by our tests, the S210T performs at par with every other i3 powered laptop out there, nothing to write home about. The touch screen is very responsive and there’s absolutely no noticeable lag when navigating the Windows 8.1 UI. Four GB of RAM is adequate and we never felt the need of a faster config, assuming your work consists of browsing, an office suite and some multimedia.
All this is well and good, but there are two aspects of this laptop that were completely neglected. the first is the keyboard, which, while well-designed, don’t respond to key-strokes. Touch-typists might tear their hair out in frustration and unless you’re used to banging on the keys, you’ll drop a lot of letters while typing.
The other disappointing factor is the battery life. 110 minutes just doesn’t cut it anymore, especially for a laptop that’s this small. Spending a little more for a Haswell CPU and/or an SSD, depending on your budget, is a far more sensible option.
Conclusion
The Lenovo S210 Touch is a great laptop. It’s well-designed, adequately powered and has a very responsive touch screen. If only it had better battery life and, more importantly, a responsive keyboard, this could have been a great laptop, one that we would have blindly recommended to anyone in the market for an 11-inch notebook.