Lenovo ThinkPad X300 ultra-portable

Very occasionally, a product comes along that makes you wonder why nothing like it has ever been made before. And that’s precisely the feeling we had holding the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 for the first time. It weighs a feather-light 1.45kg, but includes a full-sized keyboard, a 13-inch widescreen and a built-in optical drive. It all seems so simple.

Once you start analysing though, you realise products like this could only appear in 2008. For the first time, technologies like solid-state-disks, low voltage processors and optical drives have reached a point they can be miniaturised – or, in the case of solid-state disks, mass produced – without making unbearable sacrifices.

And because those components are so small, a company like Lenovo can concentrate on the things that really matter to anyone who actually uses the darn thing. That means a keyboard you can type on for a whole day, a screen you can use as your main display, battery life that can keep this laptop going for ten hours.

Let’s tackle battery life first, as it’s one of the many things to distinguish the X300 from (whisper it) the Apple MacBook Air. The Air has a claimed battery life of five hours, though we’re yet to see tests that can get it past the four-hour mark. Nevertheless, let’s take that at face value: five hours, after which you have to find a power point. And remember, you can’t even buy a second battery and swap it out – the Air’s battery isn’t user-replaceable. 

The X300 comes with a six-cell battery as standard. This gives, according to Lenovo, just over six hours of life (the sample we reviewed came with a three-cell battery life that lasted for two minutes shy of four hours, so we’re ready to believe the six-hour claim).

If you’re willing to buy the extra battery that slots into the optical drive bay, that extends to ten hours of life. All without swapping out any batteries – which, of course, you can, because nobody would be fool enough to release an ultraportable where that wasn’t possible. Ahem.

The excellent battery life stems from a design that’s always got one eye on power requirements, with the most obvious sign of this being the processor. This is the first laptop to use Intel’s SL7100 chip -- a 1.2GHz dual-core processor that’s part of the Core 2 Duo family.

Surprisingly, it’s pretty fast. Coupled with 2GB of RAM, we never felt the X300 was sluggish when running Windows Vista, and our benchmarks backed this up: the only time you’ll start thinking about making a cup of tea if you want to do horrendously processor-intensive tasks like video editing.

Part of the reason the X300 feels so fast is the use of a solid-state disk: there’s none of the stuttering you sometimes get while writing to a mechanical hard disk. And that’s just the beginning of the SSD’s benefits. Its lower power consumption leads to longer battery life, but it also means that if you drop the ThinkPad it’s much less likely to lose the data – one of the many advantages of using no moving parts in a storage device.

Of course, there are disadvantages to solid-state technology as well. The X300’s storage capacity is just 64GB, compared to 160GB we’re starting to see in even budget laptops. And then there’s the price, and much of the X300’s £2,000 tag is due to the choice of storage.

If you’re willing to miss out on some of the reliability and speed benefits of solid-state technology though, just stick around for a couple of months. By April, we expect to see versions of the X300 using conventional disks, and their prices will be much more reasonable.

Another technology Lenovo uses to keep the weight down and the battery life up is LED backlights for the screen. This also helps it keep super-slim. Unless you’re a screen aficionado, you’re unlikely to notice much difference between an LED-backlit display and the more standard cold cathode fluorescent lamps. Theoretically, LED technology leads to more accurate colours, and we’ve certainly no complaints when it comes to the X300’s colour accuracy.

What most people will be more struck by, however, is the limited viewing angles. To get a perfect picture, you’ll have to tilt the lid to around the 110-degree mark, which may not be possible in the cramped conditions of a plane or train seat.

If you’re used to an ultra-portable like the ThinkPad X60 or Toshiba’s Portégé R500 series, you may also be put off by the extra 20mm or so in the height of the lid – possibly just enough to mean the screen doesn’t tilt all the way back when the person in front of you is reclining their seat.

Nevertheless, there are huge benefits to Lenovo’s choice of this 13-inch widescreen. Its 1440 x 900 resolution means you can realistically view two documents side by side, and it makes trawling through spreadsheets much easier.

We love the full-sized keyboard too. Note the seven full rows of keys – there are no sacrifices, no awkward “function doubling” where one key is used for two or more purposes. We’re also pleased to see the choice of a trackpad (which can be switched off by pressing Fn-F8 if it gets irritating) and a trademark ThinkPad trackpoint.

It’s also good to see three USB ports scattered around the chassis, giving a fair amount of external expansion. At your home or work desk, one could be connected to the optional port replicator. This has a neat tower design and usefully includes a VGA output for permanent connection to a display – resolutions up to 1280 x 1024 are supported.

The other ports on the chassis itself include a microphone input, headphone output, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a full-size VGA connector. We’d have liked to see a DVI-I output instead, but at least there’s no fiddling with USB-to-VGA converters like you have to with the MacBook Air and some other ultra-portables.

One sacrifice Lenovo does make is the anachronistic modem port, but far more useful to most travellers will be the built-in 3G modem. With full support for the fastest HSDPA standard, that means you’ll get broadband-like speeds in all major cities. You’ll be able to order a version of the X300 with a Vodafone SIM, but we were pleased to see that Lenovo doesn’t try and tie you into any deals and the laptop will work with any SIM.

The ThinkPad’s other wireless features are more mainstream. There’s Bluetooth and 802.11abg, plus Draft-n if you happen to have a router that supports it. Infrared, you won’t be shocked to hear, isn’t included.

It’s also easy to be blasé about one of the X300’s other unique features, when compared to non-ThinkPads, including the array of ThinkVantage Technologies. But pressing the discreet rectangular blue button that sits above the keyboard opens up some surprising features. For instance, press it while Windows is running and you get instant access to a proper tour of the X300 – see it from the left-hand view and click on a feature (such as the ports) to see what they do. Get updates to your particular system. Or choose to do an instant backup.

The latter could come in handy if and when something dreadful happens to your data, whether it be from a virus attack or a driver download gone wrong. Fortunately, there’s a full-blown operating system you can access in just such an emergency.

Again, that blue ThinkVantage button is the key. Press it while the X300 is just beginning to boot, and you get the chance to load Lenovo’s Rescue and Recovery OS. This allows you to go back to the factory settings, to a previously saved disk image or just to transfer urgent data from the system disk to an external drive.

Another very nice feature is that it allows you to access the web via a browser, so if you need to make some urgent downloads to fix a problem then you can. It’s reassuring to see a three-year warranty in place too.

If you or your company is of an environmental bent, you should also be please to see the X300’s EPEAT Gold rating, gained through the use of recyclable packaging, arsenic-free LCD glass and all those energy-efficient components.

It adds up to one incredibly well designed laptop. Sure, not everyone will appreciate its all-black and faintly angular design, and that stiff price will need an equally stiff drink to make it more palatable. But this laptop is an investment and if durability and usability are what you’re looking for, together with exceptional battery life and that light weight, not a penny of your £2,000 will be wasted.