You might ask, “so what?” And that’s a fair argument. I’ve never heard an iPhone 4 owner moan about the speed of the interface, or anyone who’s bought a recent Android phone for that matter.

But there is something psychologically satisfying about using a phone that jumps in response to commands; going back to my usual phone afterwards, things seemed to be in slow motion.

There are practical benefits too. Watch the clip below and you’ll see how well the K800 copes with complicated HD video.

HD here means 720p, with the 4.5in display having a 1,280 x 720 resolution. This makes the video look crisp, but with the addition of an Intel Wireless Display adapter (WiDi for short) you can even watch movies directly on your TV; no wires required.

This phone also includes an 8-megapixel camera capable of shooting HD footage, but the limitations of the small lens and sensor were obvious in my test shots; then again, light conditions in the Lenovo stand at CES weren’t exactly favourable.

Other things to note about the K800 itself: it’s not the world’s most attractive design, with a square-jawed black finish and none of the slimness we’ve come to expect from modern phones, and it includes all the wireless radios you could ever hope for – including WCDMA HSPA+ for 21Mbits/sec downloads.

To a large extent, this is all moot: unless you happen to live in China, you won’t be able to buy the K800 (and even then you’ll have to wait until sometime between April and June). It should be seen, more than anything, as proof of the ability to squeeze an Intel Atom processor into such a tiny chassis.

So let’s get to the specs. Inside there’s a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 CPU with 512KB of Level 2 cache; this is Intel’s Medfield smartphone platform, which has been long talked about but never previously seen in a proper product.

Note there’s just a single core inside the Z2460, with dual-core Medfield chips likely to debut in Motorola phones later this year. Nevertheless, according to benchmarks performed by Anandtech, this is a darn quick phone: a third quicker than the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, and almost 20% faster in BrowserMark.

To put that into perspective, the Galaxy Nexus was previously the fastest phone Anandtech had tested, including the Apple iPhone 4S.

According to Intel, it’s also highly competitive when it comes to power consumption:

If those power graphs are to be believed (and we’ll hold off on that until we see some Medfield-based phones that we can actually battery test), the K800 is a definite victory for Intel, and a signal to ARM that it won’t have things all its own way in the coming years.

And going back to the question I asked right at the start – why does this matter? Because it opens up big possibilities for phones of the future, as they edge closer and closer to being what we used to call computers.

None of them has so far become a real product (though there are definite similarities between the 48-core Rock Creek CPU and the 50-core Knights Corner architecture). But it’s always fascinating to see what the chip giant’s boffins are working on. This week’s event – held at the company’s offices in Leixlip, near Dublin, and opened by Irish business minister Richard Bruton (above) – showcased several intriguing new ideas – as well as one eerily familiar one. Below the cut are some of the highlights.

The Personal Energy Cloud

The Personal Energy Cloud is Intel’s jargon for the halo of power consumption that follows you around – the wattage of the light bulbs you use, for example, and the intermittent drain of the television.

It’s a concept that neatly expresses what CEO Paul Otellini has described as Intel’s “long-standing obsession” with power consumption; but as yet it’s ill defined. Officially the aim is to help individuals “navigate the sea of energy data”; Eve Schooler from Intel Labs demonstrated how this might be accomplished using a sort of “Marauder’s Map” of electronic devices, which could be centrally managed, to help reduce power wastage and determine which individuals could access which resources when. For now though the energy cloud appears to be more a notion than a focused project.

The Personal Office Energy Monitor

Next to the airy energy cloud concept, the POEM system, demonstrated by Intel Labs’ Sylvain Sauty and Milan Milenkovic, seems almost prosaically practical. Designed primarily for large workplaces, it works by equipping every PC with a simple USB sensor unit which measures ambient temperature, light, pressure and humidity levels, as well as recording the power consumption of the computer itself.

By feeding this information back to a environmental management system, it becomes possible to minutely manage electrical services such as air conditioning and lighting, to ensure that each employee has what they need without any wastage. A friendly PC-based interface also allows employees to monitor their own power usage, and to send feedback via simple buttons with labels such as “I’m too cold”. Though Intel didn’t explicitly suggest it, one imagines that feedback like this could even permit a building to “learn” the perfect settings for each section of a building throughout a day.

Simple Energy Sensing

Simple Energy Sensing is a neat idea – a home energy monitor that can identify individual appliances from their characteristic electrical signatures – but there’s no escaping the fact that the demonstration system on display at Leixlip was the very same one I had already seen 16 months ago in California.

Intel’s James Song had the good grace to look slightly sheepish when I pointed this out, but directed me to research manager Charlie Sheridan, who assured me that the project is moving forward through domestic testing.

“We’re trialling the system in 15 employee homes in the US,” he told me, “and we’re preparing for our first aggressive push, into 200 homes in Texas. We’re also partnering with local utilities, in Ireland and the US.”

Did this mean Intel would be relying on electricity suppliers to monitor power consumption, after the manner of the now-defunct Google PowerMeter service?

“The involvement of the utility companies is purely to validate the technology,” Sheridan explained. “We’ll try to keep as much data within the consumer’s home as possible.”

Crowd & Sensor Sourced Services

Like the POEM system, Intel’s experiments in crowd-sourcing are unapologetically down-to-earth, but they could open up as yet unimagined possibilities. Simply put, the idea is to maintain a vast, anonymised database of sensor and GPS data, to “gather, process and share data securely” – and make it available to real-time applications.

One obvious use for the technology is for collating GPS data into real-time traffic reports, as already seen in services such as Vodafone Sat Nav. A prototype system, offering both laptop- and tablet-style interfaces, was on display (see photo).

But as Intel’s Ahmed Mohamed explained, by incorporating additional sensor data, more sophisticated services could be implemented within the same framework. For example, if large numbers of cars started sharing shock absorber data, it would be easy for councils to locate potholes in roads. The potential applications would be limited only by people’s willingness and ability to share data – and by the imagination of the developers.

The Dependable Cloud

Many businesses operate as hosted services, but there’s currently no simple framework for ensuring a particular set of legal obligations or policies is met by the host.

The Dependable Cloud – the brainchild of Intel’s Michael Nolan – is a framework which makes it easy for hosting customers to specify various policies, and for hosts to provide them. For example, for legal reasons a company might wish its virtual machines to run only on servers in certain geographical locations. Or, for reasons of security, it might want them to run only on hardware capable of enforcing trusted execution. The system can also help hosts manage SLAs in cases of reduced capacity, by automatically allocating resources according to service-level policies.

The Dependable Cloud concept hasn’t yet reached the likes of Amazon, but it’s already attracted support and funding from the EU’s SLA@SOI consortium.

DDR3 and Hyper Graphics

Intel engineers are always talking about optimising performance, so it’s no surprise to see some of their research projects focus on hardware metrics. The DDR3 analysis project, demonstrated by Matthias Grees, uses an interposer card that sits between the motherboard and DIMMs in a standard PC and measures bandwidth and power consumption in real time while applications are running. The data enables software engineers to keep track of how hard their programs hit memory, and helps hardware engineers develop better performing, more efficient memory controllers.

“Right now we use this internally,” commented Grees, “but if we wanted to we could productise this in about a year.”

The Hyper Graphics project has a similar aim, namely to monitor the use of L1, L2 and L3 cache in a running system. But rather than using hardware, this research, headed by Qiong Cai of Intel Labs Barcelona, runs applications and games inside a virtual machine that’s been modified to monitor cache requests. At present the project focuses specifically on the cache usage of integrated GPU, and has accordingly been dubbed “Hyper Graphics”.

The system is particularly useful for its ability to track “cache misses” – requests for data that isn’t in the local cache, which can cause significant performance degradation. With this information, developers can see exactly which parts of their software could be optimised to make better use of caching. And, since the system can simulate caches of arbitrary sizes, engineers can experiment with different cache arrangements to see precisely how larger or smaller caches would affect the performance of real applications.

Multi-Reality Interfaces

The name may sound like science-fiction, but the Multi-Reality Interface is another project with a solid real-world purpose. The idea is simple: the interface shows both a live video feed and a real-time digital representation of the same environment.

Though it wasn’t immediately obvious to me why this would be useful, Jochen Grün from the Universität des Saarlandes explained: the manufacturing industry is moving to a modular factory model, where a single building can be rapidly retooled to make different items with different equipment. This means onsite personnel may be unfamiliar with the machinery they’re using, and unqualified to carry out repairs in the case of a problem.

A multi-reality view allows a remote expert to give immediate guidance. The live video view (which can optionally be presented in stereoscopic 3D) shows the situation on the ground, while the digital representation can show sensor data and other necessary details. With this information, one expert can provide instant instructions and advice to staff across multiple sites, keeping maintenance costs to a minimum. And because the system is built on web standards, the onsite staff can follow along on any portable device.

Lego Digital Box

Intel’s joint venture with Metaio Software and Lego was demonstrated at IDF last month, but for most Research Day attendees today was their first encounter with the Digital Box system – and it’s safe to say this playful take on augmented reality stole the show.

Though nominally a research project, the system’s already being rolled out to toy shops worldwide. You activate it by simply holding a box of Lego up to a camera. As soon as the software recognises the box, it superimposes a 3D representation of the assembled kit onto the top of it, so you can see what it looks like. If you want to see from the other side, simply rotate the box: the 3D image is anchored to the box and follows its motion in real time. And just to liven things up, the generated image is populated with animated Lego characters.

The system relies on nothing more than a simple webcam, a standard mobile Sandy Bridge platform and custom software. But the impression is something special – as you can see for yourselves in this demonstration video provided by Metaio:

Let us make one thing absolutely clear: these are the most stunning laptops to ever bear the Asus brand. They’re also the best looking Ultrabooks we’ve seen so far – more alluring than Toshiba’s, Lenovo’s and Acer’s.

And there’s no doubt about it, Asus better have the lawyers ready, because these two new models bear more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s MacBook Air.

The circular swirls on the lid add a welcome bit of individuality, and both models sport a metal chassis that tapers from 3mm at the front to 17mm at the rear. Combined with gloriously stout build, it’s hard not to come away impressed. The build quality is excellent, and while our Asus contact winced as we tried to snap their latest laptops in two, the chassis barely flexed at all.

The specifications are just as impressive. The 11.6in UX21 partners a 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M processor with 4GB of memory and a 128GB SSD, while the 13.3in UX31 is identical apart from two crucial upgrades: it’s got an even speedier 1.8GHz Core i7-2677M processor, and the display resolution bumps up from 1,366 x 768 to a spacious 1,600 x 900.

Asus claims around five hours of battery life for the baby of the range and over seven hours for the UX31, but the real fanfare was reserved for the system’s resume and standby abilities. While both systems spring from deep sleep in just two seconds, the UX21 is able to last a week on standby and the UX31, two weeks.

If there’s one casualty of Asus’s ruthless fat-trimming, though, it’s connectivity. Both models plump for two USB ports – USB 2 on one side, USB 3 on the other – and both shrink their D-SUB and HDMI sockets down to miniature proportions. You’ll need to make sure not to forget the Micro-HDMI and mini-VGA adapters on your travels. The only difference on the larger UX31 is the addition of an SD card reader – Asus couldn’t quite find room for one on the UX21, apparently.

Beauty and beastly strength aren’t the Zenbook’s only qualities, however, and Asus’s latest feels every inch the luxurious Ultrabook. The stiff base means that there’s not a hint of wallow in the keyboard, and the Scrabble-tile keys feel crisp and lively. The subtle scooped-out profile on each key is a nice touch, too, helping the smooth keys grip each fingertip for a more confident feel. In fact, our only gripe is the lack of keyboard backlighting – a disappointing omission.

The large glass touchpad beneath seemed pretty solid, but we’ll definitely want to spend a little more time with the Zenbooks before we make a final judgment. We’ve no qualms with the silky smooth surface, which makes for accurate, responsive cursor control, but we’re not quite so sure about the slightly stiff-feeling buttons along its bottom edge – these might take a little more getting used to.

If you’re wondering about the price of admission to Asus’s Zenbook range, well, you may just be in for a rather pleasant surprise: the UX21 is up for grabs at £849 and the UX31 at £999 – a few hundred pounds cheaper than the comparable MacBook Air models. With both laptops available to order from 21 October at Currys, PC World, Comet and Amazon, and our review units just days away, we have a feeling that this is the Ultrabook everyone’s going to want to get their hands on. Stay tuned for the full PC Pro review.

It’s rare that we see a review system that doesn’t pack an overclocked punch, but the launch of AMD’s Bulldozer-powered FX processors saw the firm use gallons of liquid nitrogen to break the world record for the highest frequency computer processor – previously held by a Celeron – and run its new FX-8150 at a ridiculous 8.429GHz.

That potent fluid is the preserve of the world’s most skilled overclockers and, before its record-breaking attempt, AMD held a test run in front of a small London audience – one of the first times, in fact, that the firm’s overclocking guru Sami Makinen had pushed Bulldozer to its limits.

While Makinen didn’t hit the same heights he managed during the Guinness-monitored attempt, he still took the new chip to a staggering 8GHz clock speed. He tried for 8.2GHz, but the sample he was using begun to crash.

Take a look at our pictures to see exactly what’s involved with extreme overclocking, from putty around the CPU to canisters of potent LN2 – and check out that temperature, too: a chilly -180°C.

Intel’s grand push of the Ultrabook concept has clearly inspired design minds across the globe, including Acer’s. The S3 is the best-looking laptop to roll off Acer’s assembly line in recent memory: measuring 13mm at its thinnest and 17mm at its thickest, and weighing in at a svelte 1.3kg, this is a gorgeous ultraportable. Sorry, Ultrabook.

Opting for a magnesium-alloy construction, the Aspire S3 is dressed top to toe in metallic grey, with a matching scrabble-tile keyboard and a strip of black at the rear. Yet, if this were purely a catwalk competition, the Acer would have trouble wresting our gaze from either Lenovo or Toshiba’s more striking figures.

In terms of all-out construction, it falls somewhere in the middle of the pack. Grappling with the Aspire S3 reveals it to be substantially sturdier than Toshiba’s slender Portege Z830, but it’s not bulletproof: heavier-handed abuse revealed some give in the Acer’s base and a slight flex across its silvery lid.

Start pecking away at the Acer’s keyboard and you’re unlikely to come away disappointed. It’s still not the match of Lenovo’s supreme effort, but the stout construction means that there’s no sag or give anywhere to be found. The keys have a light crisp action, and we’re big fans of the wide shift keys flanking either side.

We weren’t anywhere near as keen on the touchpad. Acer may have followed the trend for glass touchpads, but going by the pre-production samples we saw, they haven’t got it quite right. The whole pad clicks like one giant button, but there’s just a bit too much give for our liking, and the touchpad seemed to wobble just slightly with every press.

The screen disappointed, too. With a 13.3in TN panel and the usual 1,366 x 768 pixel resolution, the units we saw were seriously lacking in brightness. Colours lacked their usual lustre and whites were tainted with a yellowish hue: we hope the production models are significantly better.

Connectivity doesn’t throw up any huge surprises. The two USB 2 ports are a bit of a disappointment – we would have hoped for at least one USB 3 – while video outputs are limited to an HDMI socket positioned alongside the power socket at the rear. A combined headphone/microphone socket and SD card reader, meanwhile, are positioned on the sides. We heard no mention of 3G, with single-band 802.11n buddying up with Bluetooth 4. There’s no Gigabit Ethernet, though - Toshiba’s Portege Z830 remains the only Ultrabook we’ve seen with wired networking.

The Acer’s trump card looks to be its price, however. With entry-level models starting at 799 Euros and working their way up to 1199 Euros, the Aspire S3 may end up being the cheapest Ultrabook on the market. Processors start with Intel’s Core i3 and work up to i7, while lower-end models make do with mechanical HDDs rather than the SSDs that are de rigeur on rival Ultrabooks.

With a UK launch event next week, and the promise of availability ‘in select regions’ of Europe sometime in September, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that a review unit will soon be winging its way to PC Pro’s offices. At the right price, Acer’s Ultrabook could yet be in with a chance.

While other manufacturers have been focusing on tablets and phones at this year’s IFA trade show, Lenovo has also chosen to introduce its IdeaPad U300s – one of the first examples of Intel’s Ultrabook concept we’ve seen.

And with the promise of serious processing power in a slender 14.9mm thick chassis, this latest addition to the IdeaPad range is a bona-fide stunner.

It can’t quite match the likes of Samsung’s 9 Series or Apple’s Macbook Air 13in for lust-inducing slenderness, but it’s still utterly gorgeous. That 14.9mm thick chassis weighs in at just 1.3kg, yet, thanks to the all-aluminium construction, feels far from insubstantial.

There’s a little flex when you really tug at the seams, but not much: the base feels taut, and the lid looks to afford the display a considerable amount of protection.

The attention to detail in Lenovo’s design is impressive. Lenovo claims that the U300s is crafted from a single sheet of aluminium, which is then sandblasted and anodised to make it tougher and more scratch-resistant.

Then there’s the noticeable lack of vents in the U300s’ gently curved base: instead, Lenovo keeps the Core i5 and Core i7 processors cool by virtue of a discrete vent on the left-hand edge and maintains cool-running by using a “breathable” keyboard, which allows air to circulate through the gaps between the keys.

Any fears such novelties might affect usability swiftly prove unfounded. The scrabble-tile keyboard has a light, crisp feel, and the glass touchpad beneath it behaved brilliantly during our snatched moments with the U300s. Just like Apple’s Macbooks, the glass gives a lovely smooth, solid feel under the finger, and left- and right-clicks were recognised reliable despite the lack of discrete buttons.

Lenovo has done a great job of giving the U300s a classy, uncluttered look, but there’s still enough connectivity where it matters. There’s a single USB 3 port alongside an HDMI output, and a USB 2 port on the opposite edge.

We didn’t have enough time to give the glossy 13.3in display anything more than a cursory look, but the brightness levels were impressive and colour reproduction was punchy. One thing’s for sure, it looks better than the decidedly average LCD in Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 ultraportable.

The seam-free chassis does of course mean that Lenovo has had to opt for a non-replaceable battery, but the claims of eight hour battery life in MobileMark 2007’s Productivity test give us some hope. In tandem with Lenovo’s excellent RapidCharge technology – which charges the battery to 50% capacity in just 30 minutes – the U300s is looking very promising indeed.

A keen price further bolsters the IdeaPad U300s’ appeal. Models sporting low-voltage 1.6GHz Core i5-2647M and 1.8Ghz Core i7-2677M processors will see the light of day towards the end of October, and our contact suggested a model sporting the low-voltage 1.6GHz Core i5-2647M processor, 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD would be available for around 999 Euros, which looks to severely undercut the likes of Samsung’s Series 9 900X3A.

Lenovo looks to be onto a winner with the U300s. With build quality and ergonomics reminiscent of a ThinkPad, and looks that can rival Apple’s best, it heralds an exciting future for Intel’s Ultrabook concept. The ultraportable is dead; long live the Ultrabook.

They’re from some of the systems not featured in our first post, and come with a range of features designed to whet appetites and empty wallets. All have at least two graphics cards, some have bespoke water-cooling systems, and there’s even one that’s been designed with input from BMW. And that’s before we’ve got to keyboards that have their own cooling fans.

Like what you see? If you do, then you’ll want to pick up issue 204 of PC Pro, which hits the shelves tomorrow with seven of these remarkable systems taking centre stage.

Lining up the systems on our test benches, though, proved just how spectacular these PCs are: SSDs, water-cooling and touchscreen fan controllers on the inside; triple monitors, adjustable mice and £400 speakers on the outside.

As well as benchmarking, I’ve spent plenty of time in the Labs taking pictures of these stunning computers. To get the full low-down on which system takes the Ultimate PC crown, you’ll have to wait until Thursday when PC Pro issue 204 hits the shelves. Until then, take a look at these pictures, try not to drool, and pick out which you’d buy if you had several thousand pounds to spare.

Intel’s “Oak Trail” Atom processor refresh has finally arrived, claiming to reduce heat and power consumption enough to power the next wave of tablets. On those promises it appears to deliver, with the Motion CL900 lasting almost eight hours on one charge – despite the bloat of Windows 7.

But if tablet manufacturers think this is the turning point for the Windows tablet – which, judging by the press releases arriving in my inbox, they do – they’re missing the mark by a mile. Yes, Oak Trail lowers the TDP to 3W to better suit handheld devices. But in doing so it takes a step backwards.

We’ve seen dual-core Atom tablets in the past, but the Z670 is a single-core processor running at 1.5GHz. In all of our benchmark tests that puts its performance right next to single-core Atom netbooks – that is, at the bottom of the chart. In the netbook world, we’ve long since got used to the boost that dual-core provides, and even then there are still many things a netbook can’t comfortably do.

Improved battery life could be put forward as a justification for the backwards step, but only if the software was lightweight enough for a single core to suffice.

Lightweight. Windows 7. Hmm.

So the problem is Microsoft. The Oak Trail processor could dance the salsa and excrete cold, hard cash out of its air vents, but it’s still powering a car crash of a tablet OS. Windows requires a faster processor than a mobile OS, yet Intel is giving us a slower one and telling us that’s for the better.

That doesn’t even begin to cover the general problems with Windows 7 as a touch interface, over which Oak Trail has zero influence.

To be fair, Oak Trail is a technological success. If Intel ports Honeycomb onto it, as rumours suggest, we’ll see just how good it is compared to the ARM competition. But until Microsoft catches up and provides a proper tablet operating system, a new processor won’t make a blind bit of difference to its share of the tablet market.

It’s already made its stateside debut, but over in good ol’ Blighty Lenovo has finally shown off its latest business ultraportable, the 13.3in ThinkPad X1.

From the off, it’s an unmistakeably classic ThinkPad. A sea of smooth matte black – magnesium alloy top and bottom – stretches all around, interrupted only by the occasional flash of red. It’s seriously slim, too, measuring just 17mm thick and adding a claimed 1.7kg to your laptop bag.

All the ThinkPad hallmarks are in place. The trackpoint glares from the centre of a backlit Scrabble-tile keyboard whose concave keys have travel and feel in abundance. Even though the multitouch pad integrates the mouse buttons into its bottom edge, they too deliver a quality feel with every click.

Display-wise, we’re not convinced by the rumours that Lenovo were going to employ a premium IPS panel. With a fair amount of contrast shift evident in the its vertical viewing angles, this looks more like a decent TN to our eyes. Still, it’s good enough: it didn’t look to offer the natural colours of a Macbook Pro, but strong contrast puts it well ahead of the disappointing panel on Sony’s VAIO S Series. Brightness hits a claimed 350cd/m2 and cranking the ThinkPad X1’s display up to maximum was enough to make us believe that figure.

The decision to employ a layer of Gorilla Glass left us conflicted, however. While the extra resilience is welcome, the glossy reflective finish isn’t. Even under the fairly dim lighting of last night’s event, you can see the lights glaring back in the picture above. And the 1,366 x 768 pixel resolution? That’s downright disappointing – given a choice, we’d have the 1,440 x 900 resolution of the old X301 back in a flash.

Still, the toughened display is well in keeping with Lenovo’s design brief. At 1.7kg, there’s no question the X1 is a slightly chunky ultraportable, but it feels like one that’ll survive years, rather than months, on the road. A fingerprint reader and TPM 1.3 chip deliver the data security you’d expect from a proper business portable, and the hard-disk drop sensor and spill-proof keyboard (you can see the drain hole in the picture below) help guard against physical disasters.

Performance and connectivity sees the ThinkPad X1 play its trump cards. Sandy Bridge takes pride of place, and there’s no recourse to the low-voltage variants: it’s a 2.5GHz Core i5-2520M. Lenovo’s employed the full-fat Intel vPro chipset, too, with all of its remote manageability benefits. All the usual ports and connectors line up sensibly at the laptop’s rear - there’s an SD card reader, one USB 3 and one USB 2 port, eSATA, Mini-DisplayPort and HDMI - and Gigabit Ethernet, dual-band 802.11n and optional integrated 3G tick every networking box going.

Lenovo claims five hours of battery life from the lithium-ion cell, with the optional battery slice doubling that to the ten-hour mark. That’s a mite underwhelming, but with Lenovo’s RapidCharge battery technology charging each battery to 80% capacity in just 30 minutes, the X1 looks like it’ll have the chops to survive the longest working days.

While it is genuinely impressive to see how much Lenovo’s managed to pack into the X1, it comes at a price that’ll make a serious dent in anyone’s IT budget. Insight UK have the X1 on pre-order with a Core i5-2520M, 4GB RAM and 250GB hard drive for £1,226 inc VAT, and the top-end 160GB SSD and 8GB RAM model reaching £1,663 inc VAT. One thing’s for certain: with Sony’s similarly priced VAIO Z Series due for an imminent relaunch, and the ThinkPad X1 slated to start shipping in June, this isn’t going to be the only premium ultraportable vying for a piece of your IT spend in the upcoming months.

We’re looking to squeeze a final review unit out of our Lenovo contacts in the next couple of weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for the definitive PC Pro verdict.