Lenovo ThinkPad X1

When Lenovo discontinued its ThinkPad X300 series, many mobile professionals were disappointed that they could no longer buy the svelte 13-inch laptop, which combined a lightweight soft-touch chassis with a comfy keyboard and a high-res screen. Fortunately, after nearly a year, Lenovo has debuted a new 13-inch business ultraportable in the ThinkPad X1. The 3.8-pound, $1,399 X1 delivers a lot for the money, including a speedy second-generation Core i5 processor, a bright 350-nit screen, a backlit keyboard, and a rugged chassis that's built to survive falls. This machine is so good that more than just business users should check out our in-depth review.

Design and Ruggedness

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1's chassis is an evolution, not a reinvention, of the classic ThinkPad design. The all-black chassis is made entirely from soft-touch, rubberized material that's as durable as it is pleasant to touch. Lenovo has taken great care to give the ThinkPad X1 a clean look, going so far as to seal in the battery, minimize the number of holes in the bottom, and hide its left- and right-side ports under rubber panels. The ThinkPad X1 opens to reveal an equally elegant interior with a deep palm rest, a backlit island-style keyboard, and a bright screen that's covered end to end in scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass.

At 13.3 x 9.1 x 0.8 inches and 3.8 pounds, the ThinkPad X1 is extremely thin and light compared to most notebooks, but it's heftier than the 2.9-pound 0.68-inch-thick 13-inch MacBook Air or the 2.9 pound, 0.64-inch-thick Samsung Series 9. However, the Thinkpad X1's somewhat bulkier frame allows for a magnesium alloy top and bottom and an internal roll cage that adds superior durability. The notebook was designed to pass eight different mil-spec tests, including those for sand exposure, vibration, mechanical shock, and extreme temperatures. Better still, Lenovo claims that the X1 can survive drops of up to 1.6 meters (5.2 feet), though it may suffer some damage from such a fall.

Keyboard

Putting a ThinkPad X1 at the fingers of a touch-typist is like placing a Stradivarius in the hands of a violinist. While all of Lenovo's ThinkPads have strong keyboards, the ThinkPad X1 features the best laptop keyboard we've ever tested.

On the surface, the island-style, spill-resistant keyboard may look nearly identical to those on the company's ThinkPad Edge series, but Lenovo specially designed the X1 keyboard for even greater typing comfort and accuracy. From the curved "smile-shaped" keys that make it easy to avoid hitting adjacent keys by mistake to the adjustable backlight (a ThinkPad first) to the gentle slope of the deck, the X1 gets everything about the typing experience right.

Perhaps the best feature of the X1 keyboard is the strong force feedback it provides; it reminded us of the highly tactile IBM model M keyboards of the 1980s. The keys made a subtle, pleasant clicking noise as we typed.

To top it all off, the ThinkPad X1 has a soft palm rest that gently cradled our wrists as we achieved a 92 word-per-minute score on the Ten Thumbs Typing Test, our highest rate ever. We were able to continue working on the system for a long time without a hint of wrist discomfort.

Pointing Stick and Touchpad

Like other ThinkPads, the X1 features both a TrackPoint pointing stick and a touchpad. We prefer to use the TrackPoint, because it provides the most accurate navigation possible on any notebook.

If you're not a trackpoint fan, you'll appreciate the 2.9 x 2.3-inch textured touchpad on the X1, which provides accurate navigation, too. The touchpad's left and right buttons are built-in so as to provide extra surface area. Though we prefer discrete buttons, they offered decent tactile feedback without making the pointer jump as we activated them. The pad also supports multitouch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom and three-finger flicks. However, these gestures weren't always smooth, and we sometimes had to repeat a pinch in order for it to register.

Display

The 13.3-inch, 1366 x 768 glossy display on the ThinkPad X1 provided incredibly bright images, thanks to its 350 nits of brightness. However, even though images were razor-sharp, colors were not particularly deep, and the highly reflective screen produced narrow viewing angles. That said, as long as you don't use the ThinkPad X1 to show a movie to three people at once, you'll appreciate its brightness and love its scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass cover.

Fans of the old ThinkPad X300/X301 may be disappointed that the ThinkPad X1 has a lower resolution screen than its 2008 predecessor, sporting only 1366 x 768 pixels of desktop real estate, as opposed to 1440 x 900. That's 15 percent less vertical real estate for viewing web pages, Word documents, and anything that requires scrolling. It's also 5 percent less horizontal space for placing windows next to each other. Apple includes a 1440 x 900 display on its 13-inch MacBook Air.

Audio

Thanks to its Dolby Home Theater v4 technology, the ThinkPad X1 offers strong audio that was loud enough to fill our whole apartment and rich enough to substitute for a low-end stereo. Whether we were playing the bass-heavy "Forget Me Nots," the jazzy "Summer Madness," or Motley Crue's guitar-heavy "Too Young to Fall in Love," the speakers produced rich, accurate sound with a good separation between instruments. Using the bundled Dolby software, we were able to optimize for bright, rich, or warm audio, while selecting between movie, music, or gaming audio profiles.

 

Ports

The ThinkPad X1 has more than its fair share of modern ports, but it skimps a little on legacy support. On the right side is an SD card reader, an amenity the X300/X301 lacked. On the back, you'll find an Ethernet port, a USB 3.0 port, an eSATA/USB port, and both HDMI and mini Display port outs. Under a rubber panel on the left side are an audio in/out jack and one more USB port, for a total of three USB connections. The USB 3.0 port and combination of modern display options are critical additions, but businesses with old projectors or monitors in their offices will need a mini Display port to VGA adapter, because the X1 lacks a dedicated port.

 

Heat

The ThinkPad X1 stayed nice and cool throughout our testing, which is critical for a device that's made to live on your lap. After 15 minutes of playing full-screen video, we measured the touchpad at a chilly 79 degrees, the keyboard at a cool 87 degrees, and the bottom at a barely perceptible 92 degrees Fahrenheit. We consider temperatures under 95 degrees comfortable.