SlashGear

SlashGear stopped by the Pepcom Digital Experience in New York this week, and caught up with one of the more interesting netbooks on the horizon: Lenovo’s S12.  While it may physically resemble one of the company’s previous models, albeit with a larger 12.1-inch display, what makes the S12 really special is the NVIDIA Ion chipset inside.  The demonstration – which you can see after the cut – showed silky-smooth simultaneous HD encoding and playback.

Video demo of the S12 after the cut

In fact, the Lenovo S12 was using its HDMI port to output 1080p content onto a big-screen HDTV while also re-encoding a 1080p clip into an iPhone-friendly format.  Both moved on at a fair clip, and the playback was completely smooth and unaffected by the encoding process.

When you consider that the S12 is otherwise pretty much identical to a mainstream netbook today, it’s all the more impressive.  As well as Ion there’s a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM and up to 320GB hard-drive, together with WiFi, Bluetooth and an ExpressCard slot.  Full specifications are here.  The Lenovo S12 with NVIDIA Ion is expected to go on sale this month, priced at $499.99; cheaper models, lacking Ion, will start at $449.99.