Lenovo ThinkPad X120e

Pros: The AMD Fusion cpu is very fast compared to Intel Atom. Windows is quite responsive here. Great keyboard and nice plain design. Great with multitasking. Capable of playing 1080p video smoothly.

Cons: The battery life isn't as great as Intel Atom. Also, 2 finger scrolling rarely works. However, scrolling with the trackpoint always does.

Summary: This is the perfect netbook for me. The AMD APU has performance that's better than a dual-core atom (the E350 AMD CPU that is), and graphics that are perhaps better than an Nvidia ION GPU. Meanwhile, it costs as much, if not less, than one of those systems. The keyboard is great, the trackpoint is precise, and the matte black design is nice and plain (unlike all these glossy consumer machines). With the 6-cell battery, I get about 5 hours of life.

The AMD Fusion APU combines great integrated graphics (low-end by dedicated standards) with a resonably good low-end CPU.

I recommend getting 4GB RAM, but lenovo wants $80 for that. You can get a DDR3 1333MHz 2GB module for it for $25 elsewhere (like newegg). I bought a g.skill one.

Also, the laptop feels fairly cool on the palmrests and underneath the laptop, but the vent on the left is always putting out warm air. Of course, that means the cooling system is working well.

Basically, the AMD Fusion APU shows how Intel Atom is really a dog. Atom netbooks are known to be slow, and they deserve that reputation. However, this AMD Fusion system is not - far from it in fact. This is really what a netbook should be. I can do lots of multitasking with basic programs like Office and a web browser, and I can even play 1080p video (as long as I use a program that supports hardware acceleration) and some games (with low settings). Sure it can't do that with youtube, but Adobe Flash is typically terrible at using hardware acceleration, so the CPU is stuck with all that and it can't keep up. Youtube video plays fine at 720p though. I connected it to a 1080p hdtv via HDMI and played a 480p hulu video with no issues at all.

Let's see an Atom system do all that. This was $450 well spent (AMD Fusion E350, 2GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM Hitachi HD, b/g/n wifi, no BT).

Windows Experience Scores:
CPU 3.8
RAM 5.6
GFX 4.2
Gaming GFX 5.7
HDD 5.9

btw the wifi card is a Realtek 8192CE. I updated my drivers using the ones from realtek's site and wifi performance improved. It shows as a Thinkpad wireless card but it really isn't made by Lenovo. Also, the default touchpad drivers kept changing the vertical scrolling value to 1. Lenovo released updated drivers that fix that problem.

Updated on May 22, 2011

Oh also - there are a few programs like Adobe Reader and MS Office 2010 preinstalled. It wants to install a Norton trial but you can decline. I uninstalled some of the thinkpad utilities. Also, they claim it supports a max of 4GB RAM, but many report that it's actually 8GB. I haven't tried that though. Oddly, the FN key is leftmost and then the Control key, but you can easily switch them in the BIOS (push F1 or F2 during post, I forget which).