MaximumPC 2008 08

Lenovo ThinkPad

X

Proof you can have your 3-pound

cake and eat it too

When you pick up a Lenovo ThinkPad X300,

you pick up 3 pounds, 6 ounces of excellence.

In every way that the MacBook Air is stylish

and beautiful, the X300 is built to perform.

No usability is sacrifi ced for visual appeal—

inside this unassuming black chassis is a

workhorse. It sounds like an oxymoron, but

this is one sturdy 3-pound portable.

The ThinkPad held its own in most

of our benchmarks and excelled

in battery life as well as the

Photoshop and Premiere

tests. Overall, however,

it was bested by Sony’s

Vaio, which has double the

memory and a 1.3GHz-faster

CPU. The ThinkPad is the only rig in our

roundup with a solid-state drive, but we

didn’t see any huge performance gains as a

result. Unlike the Air, which includes SSD

as an option, it’s a non-negotiable feature

of the X300. We’re not convinced that SSD

is ready for mass consumption yet, but

there’s something liberating about storing

your data on a drive with no moving parts.

When it comes to usability, the X

really shines. With the SSD drive, we don’t

hesitate to pick up a still-running laptop,

whether it’s to carry it down the hall for

a meeting or to chuck it in our bag to go

home. The full-size keyboard makes for the

best typing experience in the ultraportable

field. It’s not as comfortable as a real desk-

top keyboard, but it’s darn close. And while

we think the touchpad on this notebook is

too small, it’s augmented with an oversize

pointing nub. If you use the two together,

you get a good mix of fine and granular

control. Best of all, in our real-world testing,

we got nearly five hours of life on a single

battery charge and just over three hours

with our video playback test.

While the Vaio’s software bundle is at

best an annoyance and at worst a liability,

the X300’s adds value. Its nerd-friendly

software lets you easily tie power profiles

to your location, as determined by your

network connection. This allows you to set

access and battery conservation rules au-

tomatically when you change location. We

also love the detailed battery diagnostics,

which expose everything you’d ever want

to know about your laptop’s battery, as well

as the extremely fine control Lenovo gives

you over every aspect of the X300’s power-

management facilities.

A few significant flaws preclude the

X300 from earning a Kick Ass award. The

LED-backlit screen’s anti-glare coating is

eminently practical, and we love the extra

pixels the 1440x900 resolution gives us, but

the display is a little meh. Colors appeared

washed out, and we longed for more bright-

ness. We also wish that the X300 was avail-

able with a more cost-effective traditional

hard drive. We appreciate SSD as an option,

but the small capacity and high price aren’t

right for everyone. The X300 also lacks a

few key connection options—expansion

card slots, a media reader, any digital video

outputs. While the integrated EVDO obvi-

ates one of the most common expansion

card slots, we wish there was at least an

ExpressCard/34 slot.

And, yes, the X300 includes an optical

drive. –W S

What the X300 lacks in looks and heft it makes

up for in performance.

ULTRAPORTABLE

VERDICT

$3,600, http://www.lenovo.com^9

LENOVO THINKPAD X

SPECIFICATIONS

CPU Intel Core 2 Duo SL7100 (1.2GHz)

RAM 2GB DDR2/

HARD DRIVE 64GB SSD

SCREEN 13.3-inch LED-backlit LCD

(1440x900)

LAP/CARRY WEIGHT 3 lbs. 6 oz./4 lbs.

PC Notebooks vs. MacBooks

28 | MAXIMUMPC | AUG 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com