The Lenovo Ideapad 110S is speedier than the competition and boasts a more responsive keyboard. However, its battery life is shorter than typical, and you won’t receive the fastest Wi-Fi rates.

Lenovo’s $199 Ideapad 110S, designed to be a secondary PC for adults or a first computer for children, fits a modest Intel Celeron CPU, an accurate touchpad, and a responsive keyboard inside its lightweight plastic shell. The company also includes a one-year subscription to Office 365 Personal, which is worth $70.

Despite flaws like as poor battery life and outdated Wi-Fi, the 110S represents good value for money. However, as long as it’s still available, Lenovo’s older Ideapad 100s is a better option for people looking for a longer battery life with a bit less performance.

The Ideapad 110S is a white block of plastic. Machines don’t get much simpler than this in terms of design. The Ideapad 110S is, at most, unobtrusive, though the all-white design reminds me of a 10-year-old MacBook. Lenovo’s logo is stamped on the top-left corner of the lid, but the rest of it is blank.

When you first open the laptop, you’ll notice an 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display surrounded by a thick bezel, an island-style keyboard, and a metallic power button that catches the eye and helps break up the otherwise boring appearance.

Ports

A few ports line each side of the Ideapad 110S, allowing it to connect to your favourite accessories. A single USB 3.0 port, HDMI output, and a microSD card slot are located on the notebook’s left side.

(A full-size SD card slot would have been preferable.) On the right, there are two USB 2.0 ports and a headphone jack.

Display

The display on the 110S is a little dull and not particularly colourful. When I saw the Spider-Man: Homecoming teaser, the thieves’ light-purple lasers appeared white, and the titular hero’s red-and-blue suit appeared slightly muted.

The display on the 110S supports only 70% of the sRGB colour gamut, falling far short of the 97-percent ultraportable average. The Inspiron 11 3000 (65%), 100S (62%), and Cloudbook 11 (59%) were even less vivid.

The screen of the 110S is very dull at 213 nits, well below the 303-nit ultraportable average. The Cloudbook (250 nits) and the 100S (243 nits) were both brighter than the Inspiron 11 3000, which measured a paltry 193 nits.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard on the Ideapad 110S is a mixed bag. It provides quick response but flexes under pressure. Despite the fact that the keys have a good 1.5 millimetres of travel, I found myself bottoming out as the base buckled beneath my strokes.

On the 10fastfingers.com typing test, I averaged 103 words per minute, barely below my usual 107 wpm, yet my error rate remained at 2%.

The 3.3 x 1.7-inch touchpad is just wide enough to browse Windows 10 and use gestures like tapping three fingers to activate Cortana, pinching to zoom, and two-finger scrolling.

I would have appreciated a bit more space, but it’s a significant improvement over the 100s, which didn’t support gestures at all.

Performance

The Ideapad 110S is a one-task-at-a-time laptop with a 1.6-GHz Intel Celeron N3060 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage. Scrolling slowed to a crawl when I watched a 1080p episode of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah from YouTube while having three tabs open in Chrome. I experienced lag when switching between six open tabs without video.

The 110S scored 1,830 on the Geekbench 3 overall performance test. That was lower than the ultraportable category average (5,520), but higher than the Inspiron (Celeron N3050; 1,683) and Cloudbook (Celeron N3050; 1,285). Only the 100S (Atom Z3735F) performed better in this group, with a score of 2,195.

The 110S transferred 4.97GB of mixed media files in 1 minute and 9 seconds, at a rate of 73.8 megabytes per second. Although it fell short of the ultraportable average (173.4 MBps), it outperformed the Cloudbook (34.6 MBps), the 100S (31 MBps), and the Inspiron (15 MBps) (27.9 MBps).

The 110S took 13 minutes and 23 seconds to pass our OpenOffice Spreadsheet Macro Test, matching 20,000 names and addresses faster than the Cloudbook (14:54), Inspiron (14:59), and Ideapad 100S. (22:05). However, the ultraportable average is substantially faster, clocking in at 6:34.

On the 110S, don’t expect to perform much photo editing or play video games. It received a score of 19,265 on the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark, considerably below the category average of 51,695. Competing laptops performed even worse: the Cloudbook (18,314), Inspiron (18,181), and 100S (15,081) all scored lower.

Conclusion

Lenovo’s Ideapad 110S is designed to be a secondary PC for adults or a first computer for children. It features an 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display surrounded by a thick bezel and island-style keyboard.

However, its battery life is shorter than typical and you won’t receive the fastest Wi-Fi rates. Ideapad 110S is a one-task-at-a-time laptop with a 1.6-GHz Intel Celeron N3060 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage.

The touchpad is just wide enough to browse Windows 10 and use gestures like tapping three fingers to activate Cortana.