Living With a ThinkPad X1 Carbon
I've spent a lot of time trying out Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon and I have to say I'm quite impressed. One of the devices in the new generation of ultraportables, it has a 14-inch, 1600-by-900 IPS LCD screen, plus the latest generation Intel Core i5-2427U (Ivy Bridge) running at 1.8GHz (with turbo to 2.3GHz). Despite this, the length and width are about the same as most 13.3-inch laptops and it's extremely thin—only 18mm (.71 inches) at its thickest part, which is Intel's standard for 13.3-inch Ultrabooks and notably less than the 21mm that is Intel's standard for 14-inch Ultrabooks. It weighs only 2.95 pounds. Much of this comes from the carbon fiber construction, which is strong but light, though a bit more expensive than some of the materials used by other Ultrabooks.
I've spent a lot of time trying out Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon and I have to say I'm quite impressed. One of the devices in the new generation of ultraportables, it has a 14-inch, 1600-by-900 IPS LCD screen, plus the latest generation Intel Core i5-2427U (Ivy Bridge) running at 1.8GHz (with turbo to 2.3GHz). Despite this, the length and width are about the same as most 13.3-inch laptops and it's extremely thin—only 18mm (.71 inches) at its thickest part, which is Intel's standard for 13.3-inch Ultrabooks and notably less than the 21mm that is Intel's standard for 14-inch Ultrabooks. It weighs only 2.95 pounds. Much of this comes from the carbon fiber construction, which is strong but light, though a bit more expensive than some of the materials used by other Ultrabooks.
Compared with the previous generation X1, the X1 Carbon is notably lighter, with a faster processor and a display that is both larger and higher-resolution.
In general, it seems notably faster than last year's systems. The screen is quite nice, with an anti-glare coating.
Lenovo has now moved completely to the "floating" keys (just as on the original X1) and away from the standard keyboard ThinkPad users have gotten used to. It is still easy to type on and I like the backlighting feature. It adds a much larger, multi-gesture glass surface touchpad and this is convenient for many things. You can pinch two fingers on the touchpad to zoom and shrink the display, for instance.
Other features include an HD face-tracking camera; dual-array microphones; Dolby-audio; and vPro support, with a number of security and manageability features suitable for corporate use.
Lenovo claims up to 6.3 hours of battery life although that seems to be a bit of an exaggeration to me. I was able to use it heavily for more than four hours, in part by using Lenovo's Battery Stretch option that lowers the brightness of the screen and runs the processor at its lowest speed. One obvious difference is a new charger that fits into a socket about the size of a USB port, as opposed to the rounded connector ThinkPads have been using for the past several years.
It also has RapidCharge technology and the machine certainly seems to charge quickly. Lenovo says you can get enough juice to last up to five hours of use with just 35 minutes of charge. It also has a feature called RapidBoot, which uses changes in the BIOS and the preloaded software to load only the things it needs to boot first; it then loads the other issues. I mostly suspend and resume, but do agree that it boots as fast as any system I've tried.
To be able to make the machine so small and thin, Lenovo had to leave some things out, as with many Ultrabooks. Most notably, it lacks a wired Ethernet connection and a full-size display connection (either VGA or HDMI). Instead, it comes with a USB-Ethernet cable and a mini DisplayPort connection. This makes the machine a bit less convenient than previous ThinkPads in this regard, but it's an understandable tradeoff. (Still, I like the way some thin machines like the HP Folio 13 and the Toshiba Portege U845 include an Ethernet port and a full-size HDMI port, although that isn't as flexible as DisplayPort.) On the other hand, the design is extremely thin, and that's certainly nice.
Making it thin caused some tradeoffs in other ports as well. It has two USB ports (one USB 3.0, the other with USB 2.0 plus power) and an SD card slot, but no dock connector. Lenovo does offer a new USB 3.0 dock with a wired Gigabit Ethernet connector, two DVI monitor connectors (DVI-I and DVI-D, plus a DVI-to-VGA adapter), and five additional USB 3.0 ports.
The model I tested came with a 128GB SSD, but a substantial portion of that was filled with a recovery partition (over 13GB) and some pre-installed programs, such as Norton Internet Security, Acrobat Reader, and Evernote. There is a 256GB SSD version available, but no hard drive-based model, likely to keep the machine so thin. As a result, it's not the best choice if you have a lot of large files, though that's true for most SSD-based machines today.
Overall, I am quite impressed with the X1 Carbon. It's thin, light, and fast, and essentially lets me carry a 14-inch display instead of a more common 12- or 13-inch one. Every portable machine has some tradeoffs, but this represents a new level of business notebook that I think a lot of executives will like. It's been a great machine to travel with.
Read PCMag's full review.