Lenovo S10 first impressions

Okay, I’ve had my Lenovo S10 since Friday.  I briefly played around with the default Windows XP install, upgraded the BIOS, and then installed Ubuntu 8.10 as my primary disk, and wiped the OKR (One Key Recovery) partition, since I don’t really want to ever restore Windows.

Here are my first thoughts:

1. The screen is actually more functional than I thought it was going to be.  1024×600 is just fine for pretty much everything.  There’s a little more scrolling than normal, but nothing huge.  I do find that I am running Firefox in fullscreen mode more, so maybe that makes up for it.
2. The keyboard is actually quite good.  There are only a few weird things.  The number keys are offset to the left a bit more than I’m used to, and that means I hit 2 instead of 1, for example.  There are some other keyboard quirks, like the ~ key and PgUp/PgDn buttons, but I’m sure I’ll be able to get used to those.  The key autoreapeat happens a bit faster than I’m used to, and doesn’t seem to be adjustable in Ubuntu.  (Although repeat on/off does work).  I’m just tapping faster than normal.  The keyboard is large enough that I can touch type at full speed with nearly no problems at all.  Excellent!
3. The synaptics track pad works, but the vertical motion is way too fast, and I’m tracking an xorg bug and discussion on mailing lists about the patches that are proposed to fix it.  As soon as I can get a build of the .deb for people to check out, I’ll do so.
4. Battery life.  I only have the “3-cell” version, and people complain a bit about the battery life.  It seems to be working for 2.5-3 hours for me, which is really just great for what I’m using the laptop for.
5. The CPU is plenty fast, the graphics are plenty fast, and 1GB seems like plenty of RAM.  It really doesn’t feel like it needs an upgrade.  I’ve even been doing some ./configuge && ./make stuff for the drivers, and it works speedily and well.   The Atom shows up as Dual Core, due to hyperthreading.  CPU Frequency scaling works, and the steps are 800Mhz, 1.07GHz, 1.33GHz, and 1.6GHz.
6. It’s very light, and seems very well built.  The LED backlit display is very bright (on full brightness, which I don’t really use at night).

There are a couple of weird quirks, that I’ve mentioned above but will reiterate here:

1. Touchpad vertical movement is too fast.  I’m getting used to it, but it would be nice for it to be “normal”.
2. Screen brightness is very dim after a resume from suspend.  (Dimmer than anything I can set with the brightness buttons, and it returns to normal when I adjust brightness manually)
3. I haven’t tested video (webcam) or microphone yet, but sound works great.
4. Keyboard quirks (~, PgUp, Home, F12, are all hard to press.  There are buttons unused by Ubuntu (The ‘Home’ button and Windows Menu Button)
5. I’m having a bunch of trouble with 3-button (middle mouse button) emulation in X11.  Supposedly the synaptics driver does it automatically, but I haven’t delved into this much.  It does work, but just not predictably.  I’d like to just set some key+click combo to middle mouse.
6. Keyboard key repeat rate is too fast and delay is too short, settings under Ubuntu don’t seem to take effect. (this is minor, and I’m sure I’ll get used to it)