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Lenovo ThinkPad X300 review

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Verdict

An astonishing piece of design that brings something entirely new to laptops: a 13.3in screen, full-size keyboard and optical drive in a chassis that weighs less than 1.5kg. The only drawback is that price.

Review Date: 22 Feb 2008

Reviewed By: Tim Danton

Price when reviewed: (£1,998 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

PCPRO Recommended

That's why Lenovo offers a further two battery options: a six-cell extended battery (compared to the three-cell standard unit) which adds an extra few millimetres of thickness to the X300; and an additional three-cell unit, which can slot into the optical drive bay.

At launch, the X300 will ship with a six-cell battery as standard, and as soon as we get a sample we'll post the results here.

Wireless wonder
It's no surprise to see Bluetooth and 802.11ag wireless in the X300, but we're pleased to see draft-n available courtesy of the Intel 4965AGN chip.

Better still is the WAN networking, with an internal 3G modem (which supports HSDPA) as standard with the UK models. Lenovo isn't forcing you to choose one supplier over another, but a Vodafone SIM is bundled.

There's speedy wired networking thanks to a gigabit ethernet controller, but Lenovo drops the dial-up modem; if you want this, you'll have to buy the external modem that plugs into one of the three USB ports.

All this flexibility once again underlines the X300's superiority (at least in terms of features) over the MacBook Air, which only has one USB port and wireless LAN to its name.

The ThinkVantage advantage?
Previous owners of ThinkPads will be well aware of the extra software Lenovo - and before it, IBM - loaded on to try and improve the Windows experience.

Called ThinkVantage Technologies, their physical sign is a rectangular blue button next to the volume controls. Some of these are rather basic to be called technologies - "Get support now" simply takes you to the Lenovo support website - but others are extremely useful.

For instance, select "Back up now" and within a few minutes a message will pop up that says a backup is complete. That's how things should be.

We also like the Find Wireless Networks tool. This gives a graphical breakdown of nearby access points along with a guide to their signal strengths and whether or not they're encrypted.

There's plenty more to enjoy, including a full guide to all the ports on your new laptop, so the Front view labels all the key features visible from the front and gives a brief explanation of what they do.

The X300 benefits from some clear labelling anyway. You can see there are two USB ports down the left-hand side because two logos to the left of the keyboard indicate their location. Likewise the microphone and headphone sockets.

We're also fans of the ThinkLight: press Fn-PgUp (it's no coincidence that these are the bottom left and top right keys) and the keyboard is bathed in light - perfect for dark conditions.

But we'll leave our biggest words of praise to the Rescue and Recovery interface. If things go horribly wrong, just press the ThinkVantage button as the X300 starts to boot up and you'll enter a Linux-like OS. It starts by offering some very simple options: restore from a previous backup, go back to the factory fresh disk image, or copy files to an external drive.

Click the Advanced link, though, and you'll get access to a web browser, allowing you to download patches even if Windows absolutely refused to work: a potential lifesaver.

The compromises
One minor grumble is that there's no docking station option. Lenovo points out that most people just used the X6 UltraBase docking station for the optical drive, so it's hardly vital for the X300, but there's no disputing that a docking station is neater on the desk than a USB port replicator.

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