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Lenovo Ultraportable Has SSD Standard |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Saturday, 01 March 2008 |
The new ThinkPad ultraportable
from Lenovo has a starting weight as low as 1.3 kilos (2.9 pounds) and
is less than 2cm thick at its thinnest point, but what sets it apart
from other small form factor notebooks is that it doesn't come with a
hard disk drive, well not a traditional one anyway. The new Lenovo X300
comes with a SSD (Solid State Disc) drive using Flash memory rather
than the traditional spinning disk storage found in most computer
equipment today.
SSD hard drives are still generally only found
at the premium end of the market and even then they are usually an
option rather than standard feature, but as the capacity of these
drives increases and the cost comes down we can expect to see them in
more and more devices where weight, power consumption and reliability
are more important than raw storage capacity.
At US$2,799
(A$3,999) the X300 notebook is unashamedly designed for the most
well-heeled and demanding road warriors, ultra-thin, ultraportable and
with an ultralong battery life Lenovo has designed this for maximum
mobility and performance. You should get ten hours work from this
laptop, enough for a long international flights or a full working day
away from the office.
The
X300 uses 25 per cent less power than previous ultraportables
from Lenovo, but the company hasn't skimped on features. There's an
optional, but built-in 7-millimeter slim DVD burner, stereo speakers, a
digital
microphone and an integrated camera for video conferencing.
Unfortunately, you'll have toundock the DVD burner if you want the ten
hour battery life as it takes up the same bay as the extended life
battery.
Still,
the ThinkPad X300 is the thinnest and lightest ThinkPad ever and Lenovo
has managed this by building it out of the same materials used to build
airplanes and Formula One cars.ThinkPads are pretty tough generally,
but the X300 not only has an internal "roll cage" its casing is made
out of carbon fibre.
The
notebook has a 13.3-inch LED backlit WXGA+ high resolution display
which is not only energy efficient it's actually brighter than you
would get from a traditional fluorescent backlight. Some people will
get 4G connectivity with the models designed for WiMax or even the
built in GPS functionality, while others will be content with
ultra-wideband/wireless USB, GB Ethernet and 802.11a/g/n.
Australian models will be equipped with 3G HSDPA for use on the Vodafone network.
The first processor on offer is from the same family as the recent
Apple MacBook Air. It's one of Intel's small form factor, low voltage
65nm Merom processors with a clock speed of 1.2GHz just a shade slower
than the MacBook, but more energy efficient at almost half the wattage.
It may be thin, but Lenovo hasn't strayed from the ThinkPad's
business-like design and likewise you can expect all the standard
ThinkPad enterprise class everything on the X300. The notebook offers a
layered security approach to help protect data and unauthorized access,
so standard equipment includes integrated fingerprint reader, I/O port
disablement and 32-byte password protection.
             
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