Lenovo today announced the IdeaPad S12 – first notebook featuring NVIDIA Ion chipset and company’s first 12-inch netbook. Lenovo says that the three major enhancements brought to netbook platform by S12 are larger 12.1-inch screen, 100 percent full size keyboard and better graphics with NVIDIA Ion platform.

Hardware specifications of S12 are 12.1-inch (1280 x 800) LED backlit screen, 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, Intel integrated graphics or NVIDIA Ion graphics, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 160GB hard drive, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, three USB ports, 4-in-1 card reader, VGA and HDMI. The S12 will measure 11.49” x 8.05” x 0.86”-1.13” and weigh 3.08 pounds with 3 cell battery or 3.41 pounds with optional 6 cell battery.

Lenovo says by using NVIDIA Ion chipset multimedia experience on IdeaPad S12 has improved a lot. Below we have added a video from Notebooks.com that shows Call of Duty 4 running smoothly on IdeaPad S12 with NVIDIA Ion chipset. The video clearly shows the performance improvement that Ion offers over Intel’s integrated graphics.

The IdeaPad S12 will ship in June for starting price of $449. Models with NVIDIA Ion graphics will ship later this summer. We would advice our reads to wait for S12 with NVIDIA Ion graphics.