Lenovo’s 12-inch netbook, the IdeaPad S12, will finally be available with the NVIDIA Ion chipset on October 22nd in Japan according to reports.

A post on PC Watch, a Japanese news site, apparently indicates the arrival of the S12 with Ion goodies as the same date of Microsoft’s official Windows 7 launch. NVIDIA Ion will add HD video playback capability to the S12, something a regular Atom or VIA Nano powered netbook couldn’t touch. It should even play a good variety of games, including the pretty recent Call of Duty 4 as indicated by the HP Mini 311.

It will also add an HDMI output, although unfortunately the Atom chip probably still won’t be able to handle HD Flash video like Hulu or YouTube. You’ll have to wait until sometime in 2010, when Adobe adds NVIDIA GPU acceleration support for Flash and every NVIDIA Ion PC gets an instant leg-up on its competitors. You may not realize it, but Flash animations eat a lot of your CPU and just having this update should give your system a decent performance boost.

Back in May when Lenovo announced the IdeaPad S12, a $499 target price was indicated for the NVIDIA Ion version, although this could go up to $550 according to current rumors. Other netbooks with the NVIDIA Ion platform are the HP Mini 311 and Samsung N510.

Source: [PC Watch] via [Netbooked]