Digital Trends

Lenovo ThinkPad X300

April 22nd, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Battery Life

Battery life is critical to an ultra-portable, and to test it we disable the screensaver and other battery-saving options and simply loop a DVD while surfing the Net until the battery runs out. Though this scenario isn’t a “worst case” scenario such as running 3DMark or loading the CPU to 100 percent, it’s a bit more strenuous than simply typing emails and such. In our tests we were able to squeeze 2 hours and 35 minutes from the included 3-cell battery, which is decent, but not spectacular. We can imagine it wouldn’t be difficult to stretch that out past 3 hours though using the built in battery-saving features Lenovo includes. Also, we received a low battery warning near the end of the test saying it was disabling the optical drive to preserve battery life, but we ignored it, so know that it’s certainly possible to get more life out of the battery. Lenovo also sells a larger 6-cell battery that’s supposed to be good for over six hours, and there’s also the extra 3-cell battery that can replace the optical drive for a few more hours of battery life. 

Keyboard and Drive Protector

Every time we get to review a ThinkPad we’re reminded how much we love the keyboard. It’s spot-on perfect in terms of size, feel, key travel distance and sound. And while some notebook keyboards can feel a bit squishy or soft, the X300’s felt totally solid and was a joy to use. Though we don’t like using the red nubbin and the left-and-right keys below it, it’s nice that Lenovo includes them for those who don’t like the touchpad, which is a bit small but easy to use.

Also, Lenovo includes its Active Protection software for the hard drive, which is supposed to be able to move the read/write heads out of the way in case the notebook is dropped. We wondered though, how is that supposed to work on a solid-state drive? We opened the utility and looked at the real-time status window which displays a 3D animation of the notebook that moves when you move the notebook. It noted “no shock detected” no matter what we did, even when we swung it around very fast and even dropped it on our bed, which would normally trip the sensor, it always said no shock detected. We bring this up to highlight how nice it is to have a solid-state drive. Even if it doesn’t “feel” faster than a normal drive, it’s comforting knowing you can throw the notebook around without having to worry about any moving parts inside (aside from the CPU fan).

Conclusion

Lenovo has done a very good job with the X300, and if we win the lottery soon we’d choose it over the MacBook Air simply because it’s just as portable but a lot more flexible. Despite its size, the X300 makes very few compromises to achieve such a slim profile and it’s so solid construction makes it feels almost unbreakable. The biggest drawback is clearly its small 64GB hard drive, and that situation is exacerbated by the fact that only 36GB are free. Granted it’s a business notebook so it is likely users won’t be ripping movies to the hard drive or engaging in other “home user” type of activities. Anyone could easily augment this storage with a USB drive but still – 36GB is below what we’d consider a bare minimum amount of storage for a notebook these days.

Pros:

• Amazingly light and portable
• Lots of expansion ports
• Feels rugged
• Includes swappable optical drive

Cons:

• Expensive
• Small touchpad
• Needs bigger hard drive