Design
If you've seen last year's ThinkPad X300, there are very few surprises in store here, as the X301 is simply a Centrino 2 update.
Featuring the same carbon/glass-fibre body, the X301 will most likely survive quite a drop, especially considering the solid state disk. While we gave it a solid whack from about 50cm, we started to get nervous above this, although we get the feeling it would take something special to really put a dent in this thing.
Like all ThinkPads, it features a dual-pointing system, including a trackpad and joystick, with left and right mouse buttons for both, and a middle mouse button in the top set. Lenovo's trackpad here isn't great, often not responding to our tap click regardless of how high we set the sensitivity.
The keyboard is an effort of evolution, and is possibly one of the best keyboards we've used on a laptop. Through IBM's heritage, Lenovo has refined it down to something that has both pleasing travel and can be typed on at speed. There is one annoyance — the F1 key is moved left where the Esc key should be, and the Esc key is above the F1 key. Keyboard shortcut veterans are likely to scowl as they consistently hit F3 instead of F2, and F4 instead of F3.
Shortcut buttons are sparse, being a business laptop: a mute button, volume up and down, and ThinkVantage buttons (the latter of which gives access to Lenovo's help program) is all you get.
A fingerprint reader and webcam are fairly standard, however, a feature that the X301 has over both Toshiba's R600 and Apple's MacBook is stereo speakers — not great ones, but stereo nonetheless. It also features a higher than usual 1,440x900 resolution on its 13.3-inch screen.
Features
This Windows Vista Business-based laptop (with the downgrade to Windows XP exercised on our model) includes an Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 ULV processor clocked at 1.4GHz, 2GB of RAM, a 64GB, although only Intel integrated graphics — one of the very few things the MacBook Air has over the X301. There is an upgrade to 64-bit Vista should you choose to upgrade your RAM to 4GB. A DVD+-RW drive is present, and can be turned off to conserve battery, or be replaced with a secondary battery if you like.
The laptop features a gigabit Ethernet connection and Intel's 5300AGN wireless adapter (supporting dual-band wireless N), although the wireless connection wasn't even remotely stable until we downloaded updated drivers for it from Intel's site, and used Intel's software instead of the built-in Windows XP wireless networking control panel.
The screen quality is passable but not amazing, however, it is a higher resolution than most 13.3-inch screens, coming in at 1,440x900 instead of the usual 1,280x800, an appreciated change.
There's three USB ports available (two on the left, one on the rear), although the lack of eSATA could be a problem for some, while a DisplayPort jack and a VGA port are mounted on the back, along with the Ethernet port, wireless on/off switch and power jack.
You'll want to turn off Lenovo's Network Location Manager, which pops up annoyingly every time you make a new network connection. Similarly, the included notification software is annoying, and Lenovo's update manager frequently errored out, or the servers were offline during our tests. Thankfully, the extended power management available in our XP install was excellent, allowing us to eke out extra battery life where required.
Performance
As an ultraportable, we didn't expect much from the X301 in the way of 3D performance, and with 696 being the result from 3DMark06, we were correct. PCMark05 returned a score of 3,878, meaning it's generally fine for office productivity tasks — exactly the intent of the X301 in the first place.
Battery life was horrific, not surprising considering the default option is only a three-cell — at a measly one hour, 11 minutes, 39 seconds, if the X301 is on your shopping list, make sure to get that optional replacement battery for the optical drive slot, or at least the six-cell upgrade.
The cost is a little crazy for this configuration at a hair under AU$5,000, although a bulk of money can be saved by swapping out the SSD for a standard magnetic hard drive if you're wallet conscious.
The X301 may be new guts in an old chassis, but it still has standout features untouched by the likes of Apple and Toshiba. The only real downside is the horrible battery life — but we suspect if you need an ultraportable, you'll know right away whether this one is for you or not.
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