Design of Lenovo ThinkPad X301 follows the same business philosophy that was established by IBM, although we would like to see some advances in that department. Chassis is made of magnesium alloy and in combination with roll-cage made of carbon-fiber results in notebooks rigidity and low weight. Unusual for this class, there is optical device and along with DisplayPort connector and later one is only external difference compared to ThinkPad X300 . There are not many monitors with DisplayPort connector but they will appear in the near future in larger numbers. There are also 3 USB ports (two on the left side and one on the back side). VGA and Ethernet connectors are placed at the back side along with WiFi/Bluetooth switch. On the front side are only speakers that produce clear and quality sound and they are much better than speakers on X200 model. For navigation you can use TouchPad or TrackPoint – combination that is common for Lenovo. Full sized keyboard is exceptional so typing is real pleasure with no noticeable bending. Additional button that stands out is blue ThinkPad Vantage button and it calls preinstalled applications with lot of options from which most useful to us was option of connecting to Lenovo site and downloading and updating of drivers and software. One more very useful preinstalled application is Power Manager 2 that allows very fine power consumption tuning that has option for screen power off if “Windows Is Shutting Down” message is recognized.

One of rare problems that we found on this model is lack of port replication support so we were limited by USB connection that has major fault consisted of maximum resolution of 1440x900 pixels. Same resolution is used for main display that is LED back lighted. Viewing angles have satisfactory values, sharpness and resolution are slightly above average, and since this is Non-Glare screen there will be no problems with usage of this notebook on bright sunny day.

Rest of good news can be found inside of ThinkPad X301 and those are making this notebook a real business solution. Compared to earlier model better CPU is used: Core2Duo SU9400 that operates on 1.4 GHz. Lower voltage of this CPU allowed respectable performances and low consumption at the same time. Since X301 is based on Montevina platform it is no surprise that DDR3 memory is used in this model. On the other hand we were surprised when we took a look and found one 2GB module present in this model which resulted in single channel operational mode for memory. Integrated graphics is also upgraded so Intel 4500MHD is used. Although this is fastest integrated graphics that Intel has to offer, it won’t be enough for comfortable gaming but only decent office performances and low power consumption. Most important upgrade of X301 compared to X300 model is usage of 128GB SSD instead of 64GB SSD. SSD helped Vista Business to run smoothly and more lively than expected, and Office and other applications worked noticeable faster. By combining all these components we got light, fast and power saving notebook. As you can see from the results table autonomy is great which came as surprise because we tested model with weakest 3-cell battery. Bigger and heavier 6-cell battery is also available, but if that is not enough for you there is also additional battery (3-cell) that can be placed instead of optical device and provide additional autonomy.

Presence of fingerprint reader is obvious clue that Lenovo designed this notebook for business users. Thanks to software that is also included you can use this fingerprint reader to login into any web page that need authentication. For really serious users there is also TMP (Trusted module platform) that will store encrypted data on separate disk partition. If you like to work in dark and don’t want to bother people around you, there is LED in notebook cover that can help in those occasions.