News

• The Good: Wonderfully small and thin while still offering a full-sized screen and keyboard. Manages to pack in all of the ports and functionality of a laptop twice its size and weight. 64 GB solid-state drive helps facilitate lightning quick boot times.
• The Bad: Pricey. Weak processor relative to some other ultraportables. Unsuccessfully attempts to appease both TrackPoint and touchpad fans.
• The Verdict: A strong alternative to the MacBook Air, this pricey but full-featured ultraportable ought to prove seductive to tech-savvy executives.
• 
  

Office executives, despite their conservative suits and conventional haircuts, like to show off their sense of style just as a much as the next person. One of the ways they can do this is with highly refined, eye-catching technology, like the sleek and expensive ThinkPad X300 ultraportable laptop from Lenovo.

Geared expressly for high-falutin' business folk with fat wallets — the most basic model of this workbook comes in at a cringe-inducing $3,065 — the X300, with its thin, square frame and feather-light weight, will assuredly provoke a few complements from fellow bigwigs when plopped down on a board room table.

ALL THE FUNCTIONALITY AND NONE OF THE SIZE

Its 23 millimetres of thickness and 1.4 kilograms of weight makes the 13.3-inch X300 minutely thicker and heavier than its ostensible competitor, the MacBook Air. And, unlike Apple's glossy ultraportable, the X300's matte-black finish isn't exactly flashy. However, the machine's professional and elegant conformity will almost certainly appeal to CEOs who want to flaunt their sophisticated taste in gadgetry.

More importantly, the X300 is more practical than Apple's super slim notebook—and I'm not just talking about OS/application compatibility.

It's got three USB ports, a VGA output, an Ethernet jack, Wireless-N, Bluetooth, a 1.3 megapixel webcam, a fingerprint reader, stereo speakers, and even a DVD burner. In other words, it has all of the ports and perks of a regular notebook without the customary bulk. Indeed, the X300 is the most pragmatic ultraportable I've encountered, and perhaps the first that I would have no qualms using as a primary, day-to-day work PC.

It's only weak spot is performance. With a non-swappable 1.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and just a gigabyte of RAM (that's standard; you can upgrade to 2 or 4 GB), it's a little feeble relative to some other ultraportables — like the MacBook Air, which comes with either a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, depending on configuration.

Still, the X300 has more than enough juice for any typical office productivity application or multimedia player (yes, even the boss sometimes takes a break to watch movies and YouTube clips). And since it comes with Windows XP rather than the resource ravenous Windows Vista, there's little concern of the X300 getting bogged down with background operating system tasks.

SOLID STATE SOAPBOX

Helping to make up for the X300's less than brawny processor is a bleeding edge 64 GB solid state drive — which almost certainly accounts for a third of the unit's overall price.

The question many readers will be wondering is why anyone would you want to pay so much more for something as humdrum as storage? Excuse me while I shuffle up onto my soapbox.

First and most importantly, SSDs are more durable and reliable than traditional hard disk drives. Toshiba has rated its SSDs to withstand impacts of up to 20 gees with no effect on operation, as opposed to a traditional HDD's piddly tolerance of just 0.5 gees.

They also offer much faster access to data. In internal testing of various manufacturers' SSDs, HP determined that they have the potential to cut the loading speed of an operating system in half—and, sure enough, by my watch it takes just 22 seconds for the X300 to fully boot Windows XP.

SSDs are also smaller, generate less heat, and are more energy efficient—likely a contributing factor to the terrific life of the tiny three-cell battery in the unit I evaluated, which lasted more than 90 minutes during DVD playback and well over two hours using non-multimedia applications (an optional 6-cell battery can double that time). Simply put, SSDs are the future. Gartner Research claims that they'll be in 20 per cent of all notebooks by 2010.

They're just really, really, expensive right now. As in ten-times-more-than-a-similar-capacity-hard-disk-drive expensive. Which is why, currently, they're normally found only in high-end machines like the X300.

ONE TOO MANY POINTER INTERFACES

The only aspect of the X300 that could do with some immediate attention is its ergonomics.

The full-sized keyboard feels great, and its bright 1440-by-900 widescreen, LED backlit display is decidedly easy on the eyes, but Lenovo was a bit schizophrenic about the notebook's pointer interface. Put more plainly, they've included both the ThinkPad's classic TrackPoint nub and a more standard touchpad. The problem is that the machine is too small to accommodate both kinds of interface. The nub feels comfortable enough, but the touchpad, located below the mouse buttons of the TrackPoint, is far too low on the wrist pad—so low, in fact, that it's buttons are actually part of the curving bottom edge of the laptop.

Lenovo ought to have settled on one method. Or, better still, they could have offered two models distinguished by their pointer interfaces. A comfortable interface is, after all, key to facilitating PC productivity, and a primary consideration for most laptop buyers.

THOSE LUCKY CORPORATE ELITE

Touchpad/TrackPoint issues aside, businesspersons who are always on the go will undoubtedly appreciate having such robust functionality in such a small form factor.

What's more, the X300 isn't just a travel luxury; it's a perfectly capable work machine that can be used comfortably on a daily basis for all but exceptionally demanding applications.

It's just a shame that it isn't affordable enough to find its way into the hands of the millions of average office workers who are stuck lugging two-, three-, and four-kilogram notebooks over long commutes to and from work every day.

Lower priced solid-state drives can't come quickly enough.