Lenovo staked out an aggressive claim Tuesday by launching the IdeaCentre Q180. The nettop is billed as the “world’s smallest desktop PC” and, Lenovo says, has the footprint of a paperback. It gets to that claim by becoming one of the first mainstream nettops to use Intel’s new Cedar Trail-based Atom processors, picking the dual-core 2.13GHz Atom D2700 to use just 10W of power.
The hardware is also a step up from the base performance of previous nettops. Lenovo still finds room for a Radeon HD 6450A graphics core that’s fast enough to decode 3D movies in HD and, in some cases, for modern 3D gaming. According with the home theater PC ambitions, the Q180 has an HDMI video output and a 500GB (albeit 5,400RPM) hard drive.
Prices start at $349 for a system with the above hardware as well as 2GB of RAM, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a USB keyboard and mouse, and an eight-in-one card reader, but no optical drive. A higher-tier $399 version jumps to 4GB of RAM and a DVD burner. Orders for either version are available today with extras such as Lenovo’s keyboarded media remote, although they won’t ship until December 1.
