Lenovo IdeaCentre C100 nettop - image courtesy Gizmodo

At the gdgt launch party, Lenovo was showing off a new product to be released in the near future. The IdeaCentre C100 is an all-in-one nettop, aka a desktop chassis with Intel’s Atom platform. Despite the expansive 20-inch LCD, Lenovo was able to keep the starting price at just $400, although with options you can scale that quite quickly.

You get the standard 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1-2GB RAM, DVD burner, and 80-160GB HDD. An integrated webcam and WiFI, two must-haves on this machine, are kept optional to lower the starting price. Slated for release later this month, the C100 will come with Vista initially, but a Windows 7 version will come in October with an optional touchscreen.

This is very neat and lets people get into the all-in-one space at a lower price point than the slick A600, but Atom really just isn’t suited for any type of multimedia use. Having used several netbooks and a non-Lenovo nettop, Atom is okay for web browsing and MS Office activities, but little else. Multitasking, using heavyweight programs like Photoshop, and watching hi-def video are all a no-go on an Atom-based PC. This machine needs a higher power AMD or VIA chip, which would keep the price low while making up for some performance. There is no mention on the graphics chip, but I’m expecting the defacto craptastic Intel integrated solution on all netbooks/nettops.

Source: [Gizmodo]