BERLIN—Deep within Lenovo's many announcements here at IFA, two products stood out: the Lenovo Miix 700, which is like a Microsoft Surface but better, and the cheap Ideapad 100S laptop.
The Best Tablet of IFA
The Miix 700 looks a lot like a Surface, but it works better. Like a Surface, it has a magnetic keyboard that also functions as a case, and like the Surface, it has a kickstand on the back. But the Miix 700 has a faster Intel Skylake Core M7 processor and an optional Intel RealSense rear camera for 3D scanning..
There were two Miix units at the Lenovo stand, in gold and black. The gold one was buggy, but the black one was fast and accurate, flipping into tablet mode as soon as I pulled it out of the keyboard case, with sharp, itty-bitty text in the status bar of the 12-inch screen. It was like a Surface amped up to the next level.
Now, Microsoft may very well amp the Surface up to the next level next month, at its big Windows 10 Mobile event. As the Miix 700 won't come to market until November (starting at $699), it very well may go right up against the next Surface on shelves; it will be interesting to see if it can keep its lead.
Windows 10 For $259!
The super-low-cost Ideapad 100S comes in $189 and $259 models. The 11-inch, $189 model didn't seem to be on display at Lenovo's booth, but we played with the 14-inch, $259 model for a while.
The 14-inch Ideapad 100S competes with the $229 HP Stream 13 and with Chromebooks, and you can see where Lenovo cut corners. The trackpad buttons are a little loose, and performance is not awesome. Scrolling in the Edge browser was jerky, and I got a "wait" cursor even while typing in WordPad. The 1,366-by-768 screen looked grainy and low-res.
The laptop had an Intel Celeron N3150 processor running at 1.6GHz, with 2GB RAM and 32GB eMMC storage with only 12.7GB free. That's a slower processor, and 5GB less available storage than we saw on the Stream 13, although the Stream 13 was running Windows 8.1 and not 10.
Ultimately, though, it ran. Like the Stream 13, the Ideapad 100S shows that you can get a roomy-looking Windows laptop for the cost of a Chromebook or one of those little 10-inch jobbies like the Asus Transformer Book T100TA.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story said the Miix 700 had a higher-resolution screen than the Surface Pro 3. We regret the error.