Lenovo ThinkPad X1 - Seriously Black

Seriously Black

If there was a formal black tie function this season, and all of this season’s notebooks were invited, only the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 would be allowed entry. Dressed in the unmistakable ThinkPad matte black, the slinky little 13.3-inch machine running on a Core i5-2520M at 2.5 GHz (review unit) oozes sophistication not seen anywhere else. The latest offering out of the X-series in the venerable ThinkPad line, the X1 also showcases several of Lenovo’s latest innovations. Most of these innovations (unique only to Lenovo) have been a result of intense research and development with Microsoft, so you know you have something good here.

Maximum performance was coaxed out of the X1 by making sure the software and hardware were in complete sync with each other. This results in technology like the "RapidBoot", which boasts 20 second start-up times as well as 5 second shut-down times. While most of the X1's blazing speed seen can be attributed to the 160GB solid-state drive (SSD) that the higher-specced review unit has, note that the combination of the new Sandy Bridge platform and a new SSD (these drives advance pretty fast over a short span of  time), the notebook was capable of achieving performance not seen on previous generation of notebooks even if they featured SSDs. For those who are confused with the split of the original ThinkPad line, all you have to know for this review is that the X-series represent the ThinkPad brands’ ultra-portable line. For a little more background, you can read the . So let’s start with dissecting this corporate bad-boy, beginning with the outlook of the X1.

Black Beauty

The design and appearance of laptops are akin to seasonal changes, and we’ve seen quite a few over the years. But the ThinkPad, inspired by IBM’s slogan at the time "Think" and introduced in 1992, has always retained the 'black slab' look. This seemingly uninspired black rectangular block (to non-fans) is actually the result of a collaboration between IBM’s then head designer, an Italian designer, and a Japanese IBM designer. Simply put, it just fits anywhere, be it in the office, the jungle, the desert, space and at home. And believe us when we say ThinkPads have been in every possible scenario imaginable. That’s because it’s not just a business notebook, ThinkPads are also the preferred notebook of storm-chasers, journalists, explorers, soldiers and even astronauts. While this sounds like a marketing line, that's the real world.

The reason is clear. It’s built to just start doing whatever you want it to and last, thanks to the roll cage that protects much of the machine. It would also be safe to say that at the time of writing, the ThinkPad X1 is the epitome of the ThinkPad series, with all the latest bells and whistles from Lenovo’s research labs. It’s decked out in the familiar matte black finish, which does it’s job well as an oil repellent. That means no fingerprints, no dirt, no sand, keeping its smart looks no matter where it may be.

Purists however may choose to exclude the ThinkPad X1 from the ThinkPad hall of fame, because of the lack of an iconic feature -- the latch in the front that keeps the lid down. Well you won’t see us complaining about that because the ThinkPad X1 is just keeping with the times. The hinges on the machine are also tight enough keep the lid closed when you need it to. Most of the ports are also found behind the laptop, which for convenience's sake, cause minimal interference to the space on the side, allowing you to have notepads or documents there.

Speaking of connectivity, we noticed another strange exclusion choice made by Lenovo for a business notebook - the lack of a VGA port. Given that most businesses, especially the larger ones, are slow to adopt new technology like HDMI and Mini DisplayPort. But the ThinkPad X1 comes with a many options, and among them, would be a port replicator dock that supports an analog VGA or digital DVI monitor, at up to HD resolutions. Unfortunately this is going to cost you more, along with any other alternatives you might want to consider such as USB graphics adapters or even HDMI to VGA converters.

If you find that you need immediate access to a USB port, fret not because there is one on the left side of the notebook. That and a 3.5mm audio jack is hidden behind a cover to allow for a clean look and feel, without any unsightly ports showing. It could also be there just so that dust and sand won’t jam up the ports. On the right, there is an SD card slot, for quick transferring of files. However if you assume that the cover mentioned earlier is to protect against foreign matter clogging the ports, then the exclusion of a cover for the SD card slot is quite puzzling.

A Natural Selection

Popping the lid open was like getting the present you always wanted, but with a few surprises you’re not sure you’d like. The first thing you’d wonder about is what business does a glossy screen have on a business-class notebook? Before you ThinkPad fanatics get your spreadsheet figures all jumbled up, Lenovo would like to point out that choosing this particular glossy screen over the traditional matte screen provides more advantages than you think. Because this isn’t any ordinary glass. It’s Corning Gorilla Glass.

You may have heard that name before when you were wondering why those new-fangled smartphones were so scratch-proof. To prove their point, Lenovo representatives at the launch event used a (very lovely) silver fork and started moving it around the screen. The result? Not even a smudge. We were told the decision to go with the relatively expensive scratch-proof glass is because they realized executives all over the world tend to stuff lots of things between their notebooks when shuffling around meetings.

Pens, paperclips, staples on documents, glasses and keys. You name it, it’s been stuffed there before. So naturally, the one thing that could withstand this daily but necessary abuse is scratch-proof glass. And luckily, the screen on the ThinkPad X1 (with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels) is bright enough (350 NITS) to make it through the glass in a coherent manner, without you having to strain your eyes, while trying to decipher the email your boss just sent you.

Another refinement made to the ThinkPad, is the use of a trackpad that doesn’t have any visible buttons (besides the two made for the pointing stick), allowing you to reach the furthest cells in your spreadsheet without being encumbered by those pesky buttons (the whole trackpad is a huge button by the way).

Lenovo opted to fit the ThinkPad X1 with a trendy (but very practical) island style, spill-resistant keyboard, with keys spread a rather standard 19mm apart from each other. While the keyboard itself gets no complaints from us, there is a slight flex if you prod it a little harder. Not what you’d expect from a notebook with such a distinguished pedigree and price.

Performance Benchmarking

The launch model of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 comes with a solid-state-drive (SSD) option and as a result, this is the same version we've got for our review too. While these drives are expensive, and come with relatively small storage space, they are the one factor that determines if your machine is a tortoise, or a hare in today's context. These drives also have no moving parts, so you can work with no worries while in transit to your next meeting. The X1 however does have other configurations with a normal hard drive if you're concerned of the cost. For now, here's how our review unit stacked up against a few other choice notebook models selected for comparisons.

Since we're still fresh into Sandy Bridge notebooks and companies are still refreshing their line-ups, we don't yet have an exhaustive test list, but it's a growing one surely. Add to the fact you can hardly have two identical notebook configurations for easy comparison, we'll have to make do with what's available and use our tech insight to derive if the reviewed notebook make's the grade or not. In this case, we chose a recently reviewed Sandy Bridge upgraded using a Core i7 processor and an older that ran on SSDs to have an idea how far a new and well-decked performance laptop like the ThinkPad X1 compares. Since the comparisons have discrete graphics, we've chosen to show their integrated graphics performance results to better compare with the ThinkPad X1's Intel integrated graphics.

PCMark Vantage

For comparison, we used one of the latest multimedia laptops, the second generation Sandy Bridge laptop HP Pavilion dv6, and one of last year’s top performers, the Sony Vaio Z which also uses an SSD drive array (RAID 0 configuration). The HP dv6 and the Sony Vaio Z both had discrete graphics cards. But to illustrate the ThinkPad X1's performance, we decided to use results derived from just using the integrated graphics.

The PCMark scores for the ThinkPad X1 were astounding. At 12109 points, it’s almost double HP’s latest second generation multimedia laptop, the HP Pavilion dv6 (integrated graphics). It also scored about 20% better than the Sony Vaio Z. You can tell that the SSD really improves overall test scores as a lot of these tests involve either fetching or writing content where the speedy SSD makes its presence felt. How else can an old Sony Vaio Z pounce the brand new HP Pavilion dv6 and itself lose to the seemingly lower specced ThinkPad X1?

It performed well in other detailed PCMark benchmark tests as well, but where it really pulls ahead is in the productivity (almost double the scores from Sony Vaio Z) and HDD (almost double again) tests. The RAID-0 SSD array configuration in the Sony Vaio Z theoretically sounds faster and it was in its heyday, but SSD drive technology has been improving at warp speed. The ThinkPad’s Intel SSD confirmed this point by trouncing the Sony Vaio Z in terms of pure speed. Of course the speedier Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor, along with the newer Intel HM65 chipset and its improved storage controller (derived from the same one used on the ) on the ThinkPad X1 helps as well.

This is particularly important for users who need their notebooks to crunch data and provide speedy access to their applications, because most tasks (music, movies, spreadsheets) involve your laptop drawing information from the storage drive. The faster it draws data, the faster it can work on it, which makes it seem like a no-brainer to upgrade your hard drive right? Well not really. Given the astronomical prices of SSDs these days, (the price seems to be dropping, but still a 128GB unit can cost you more than S$350) you’d seriously need the boost in OS performance to want to shell out for an SSD hard drive. If it's of any consolation, enthusiasts will tell you that once you make that change, you'll never want to look back again.

Note that this benchmark serves its purpose for mainstream usage needs, but if you're more attuned to professional work needs like 3D rendering, heavy graphics manipulation and video encoding, a quad-core machine like the HP Pavilion dv6 will definitely give you a marked advantage over dual-core machines as these tasks are very dependent on the CPU processing platform. The ThinkPad X1 can handle those tasks too, but the dv6 will do it faster as they are both built for different purposes.

3DMark06

As for its 3Dmarks scores, it fared much better than the HP dv6 and Vaio Z running on integrated graphics. However, the reason for its lead is linked to the nature of this old benchmark. Because it doesn't really benefit much from a multi-core processor, a HP Pavilion dv6 with a lower clocked quad-core processor ranked lower than the Lenovo ThinkPad X1's faster clocked dual-core processor. Both notebooks have the same integrated graphics engine - an Intel HD Graphics 3000. Sony's Vaio Z with an older generation of Intel's Core processing platform naturally came in last despite a 'speedier' processor because its integrated graphics is much less capable.

Despite this old benchmark's limitation, many of the simpler and older games would best represent what we found in 3DMarl06. We would love to test with newer 3DMark benchmarks but it requires higher resolution screens that only come with more powerful systems. The Far Cry game benchmark was skipped because with scores like these, we wouldn’t recommend any graphics intensive gaming and it's also not this notebook's forte.

In any case, this section is just to reiterate what are the X1's capabilities realistically. Videos and other general multimedia needs should not be a concern as the integrated graphics is .

Battery Life

The good news here is while you can’t play the latest 3D games in the market on the X1 (don’t tell us why you want to, your boss might be reading this), the life of the four-cell (instead of a standard 6-cell to reduce weight) battery is able to support multimedia (tested using a 720p video file loop) usage for three hours 20 minutes. For a Windows machine, it is pretty good, as it lasts almost as long as a much smaller, and underpowered netbook.

The three machines running on integrated graphics were closely tied in terms of staying alive, but do note that the HP dv6 was running on a larger capacity battery (6-cell). The X1 managed to stay alive for almost as long on its 4-cell battery, but of course it had tamer specs and a smaller screen to contend with. Another small point to note is that the battery test for the dv6 was done with a DVD loop, while testing on the X1 was done with a looped video file as it lacked an optical drive (optional) hence the X1 would be a tad less power sapping. Overall, battery stamina was about about on par with the last generation of Sony Vaio Z, which is in a similar class of notebooks as the ThinkPad X1 in physical attributes. However, when you consider that the Lenovo machine is now using a newer processing platform for better performance than the older Sony Vaio Z, the ThinkPad X1 is definitely more efficient from a performance-per-watt perspective. And it shows as depicted in the below graph. Of course, other aspects like the lack of a discrete graphics card and an optical drive also help the X1.

While the battery life and power consumption of the ThinkPad X1 seems good, this was however expected. So it's more of the X1 living up to new expectations with the new hardware and configuration rather than it being a breakthrough of sorts. However, thanks to the RapidCharge technology, another innovation by Lenonvo and IBM, you don't have to worry much if you're running out of juice because this machine can charge to 80% in half an hour - and this is a pleasant extra. On a side note, while running the notebook during our prolonged testing, the unit was cool to the touch unlike some that warm up around the keyboard area or at the base.

Portability Index

The final defining test the ThinkPad has to pass is the Portability Index. This is a quick look and at how much work you can get done on the machine versus the effort to carry the unit around with you. It takes into account the size, weight and battery performance of a notebook. Multimedia machines usually score below the 0.5 point mark, thin and light notebooks range from 1.3 to 1.5, while netbook typically score from 1.5 to 2.0 mark. Of course by and large, these are just rough measures based on our past experience and some notebooks can fair much better or worse than the norm due to certain extra attributes or the lack thereof. For the Lenovo ThinkPad X1, it performs reasonably for its range and class of 13-inch notebooks, though it's not quite as outstanding as we had hoped for.

Made to be Fast and Lasting

The design of the ThinkPad series elicits responses that are polar opposites. Some simply love the zen simplicity, the sleek "black slab" looks of the ThinkPad, while others absolutely loathe the boring matte black exterior. But no matter which side of the fence you are on, you have to admit that the ThinkPad gets work done faster than you can do it (and yet another point to raise to the I.T department).

The 160GB SSD on our test configuration is like a silent turbo engine that responds faster than you can think. The best part is you can even use it on a roller-coaster without worrying about any moving parts that could damage the drive and corrupt your data (which is what roller-coasters tend to do to hard drives). There are also options for regular hard disks with larger storage, but we would strongly advise against it because it will negate most of the ThinkPad’s advantage conveyed in this review (e.g. the 20 second RapidBoot feature will probably be closer to a regular boot).

The tough construction of the notebook is also something that gives the ThinkPad a reputation for being the "go-to" machine for professionals that place reliability and speed above all else (especially cost).

The RapidCharge feature will also save plenty of trouble for traveling professionals, as it allows for a fast charge of the battery to the 80% mark in half an hour. This means you can charge the ThinkPad X1 whether you are in the car (with an optional cable), the coffee shop, having lunch or a meeting, and be ready to roll as soon as you’re done. Very nifty indeed.

As with most ThinkPads, the X1 comes with a whole load of options, that range from an ultra-secure encrypted (it means not even Lenovo can help you if you forget the password) portable hard-disk with keypad to a USB dual-port replicator with analog/digital video outputs. Just take note that the notebook doesn't come with a standard VGA output option and will have to rely on the port replicator unit or by other cable conversion means. All these of course add to the weight in which you have to carry, so we’d advise you to consider your needs carefully before choosing a notebook option and its accessories.

The only strong gripes we might have is the lack of a discrete graphics engine option, more ports, as well as extra security options (disk encryption, smart card readers or trusted platform module support, etc.). However all of these are probably a limitation of the notebook design, which is focused at delivering a compact, slim, strong and powerful business notebook for mainstream executives rather than the ultimate solution to satisfy everyone's needs that could either be too expensive or too bulky. Once you've managed your expectations and understand the ThinkPad X1's proposition, you will realize its strengths and value.

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 costs a hefty S$3099 for the reviewed configuration, which is with an Intel Core i5-2520M processor, 4GB RAM and a 160GB SSD. You can opt for a Core i3 and normal hard drive to lower the costs, or go with a Core i7 and SSD configuration to get the top-of-the line version. Despite the price and a few shortcomings, if the notebook's strengths are exactly what you need, we’d really recommend that you discuss (bring this review along) with the I.T department about why you need this black beauty. 

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