Mobile professionals can discover a better way of doing business with the new Lenovo ThinkPad X201 tablet. Designed to be comfortable and easy to use whether the mobile professional is sitting, standing, or walking or whether he/she is using the pen, finger, or the Keyboard?the tablet is aptly built for business. Though the device might be a few months old, but its power ensures that it can compete with laptops not even in its segment. Before you decide to spend a considerable amount of money, read on to see whether it fits your
requirements.
The 12.1-inch matte screen is brighter than expected and doesn?t give the look of a touchscreen, since colour reproduction is decent and the viewing angles are very good. The screen folds over the keyboard, transforming into a tablet or can be rotated 360 degrees, thanks to the sturdy bi-directional hinge.
The X201 tablet features the classic Thinkpad design shrunk into a small form factor. The magnesium alloy body with lasting durability, soft touch graphite lid and perfectly square shaped, is all intact, so previous users of the Thinkpad series will feel right at home here and others will be a bit underwhelmed by the lack of a snazzy design, for which they should check out the Ideapad series instead.
The keyboard retains the tactility and firmness that is ever present in the Thinkpad series. If there is one problem with the keyboard, it is the placement of the function key in the place of the control key, which should definitely be corrected by Lenovo. How they managed to cram in a trackpoint as well as a touchpad is amazing. While it may be small and might require quite a bit of backtracking to navigate, it is perfectly accurate and the mouse keys have just the right feel.
The tablet touch is precise and recognises pen and finger input very well. The capacitive touchscreen makes doing multi-touch gestures a breeze with it being responsive to even light taps. Though, the small display resolution did restrict us to using mostly the pen, since the buttons and icons were small, but it has good heft which makes writing on the screen fun.
The X201 tablet really impressed us with its processing capabilities and is one of the fastest tablets we have reviewed. It managed multitasking without any lag and handled almost all office productivity applications we threw at it with ease. The tablet is definitely not made for listening to music. You are better off with external speakers. This along with the non-availability of discrete graphics restricts it to office productivity although watching online videos or playing flash games shouldn?t be an issue.
On a full load, the battery managed 2:35 which translates to around 3:30 or even at maximum 4 hours of real world varied usage. An ultra low voltage (ULV) i7 will still take up quite a lot of power and as a result has an impact on the battery score.
Wi-Max, located at the top-right of the lid will be extremely useful when there is no DSL/cable availability. Working up to a range of 50 km, it can provide last mile wireless connectivity. It also overlaps the functioning of the Wi-Fi and increases the signal range. The biometric scanner located just under the screen needed a bit of an effort to register a fingerprint but after that it recognised them at the first swipe. The ThinkVantage software includes some pretty useful system utilities and tools which are not bloatware.
To summarise, the tablet wasn?t as thin or lightweight as advertised but it is portable and can be carried anywhere. So, if a netbook with the performance of a high powered laptop is required, then look no further and be prepared to empty your wallet.
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