Laptop Buyer's Guide: 14-inch and Smaller
by Vivek Gowri on July 19, 2010 12:01 AM ESTBusiness Class: Lenovo ThinkPad X201
Did you honestly expect anything else? This is the quintessential business ultraportable. One of the first notebooks to pull off the now-trendy lack of an optical drive, the X series has a long history of being some of the most reliable and well built ultraportable systems on the market. The latest iteration is the X201, which has, as I mentioned earlier, a 12” widescreen, Core i3/i5/i7 processors, and superlight starting weight.
As a business machine, this rules. Amazing build quality, one of the best keyboards in the business, a matte screen, and basically everything else that that has made the ThinkPad line the standard of the business class for the last twenty years. Magnesium alloy chassis, steel hinges, rugged plastic, rubberized exterior coating, spill-proof keyboard, TrackPoint, Thinklight, the X201 has them all. Granted, this also means that an unwelcome ThinkPad family trait - poor quality LCD panels - is in order too (and no, the old T43p’s 15” IPS panels don’t count; those are ancient history at this point.) Having matte displays is a good thing, but when they’re poor quality panels with low contrast ratios, they’re not so appreciated.
But it’s not all about the ThinkPad stuff, the X201 has the computing prowess to back up the build quality. It’s the lightest computer with standard voltage Core i3/i5/i7 processors, even more so than the R700, which to be fair is a bit larger and has an integrated optical drive. Option up to the 9 cell battery, which bumps the weight up to 3.5lbs, and you get around 12 hours of battery life. That’s a pretty ridiculous figure for something with all the power of a full sized mainstream laptop.
You do end up paying quite a bit for all this business quality ultraportable goodness - the starting $999 price is reasonable, until you realize that it includes a paltry 2GB of memory, a 160GB hard drive, and a 4 cell battery. You can find those components in Walmart for $549 on any given Sunday, so some optional extras are definitely in order. Spec’ed the same as the $799 Toshiba R705 (Core i3, 4GB, 500GB hard drive, 6 cell battery, etc) and you’re looking at right around $1300 for the X201. Interestingly, the touchpad and webcam are optional extras on the X201. Look for a faster processor or WWAN, and you’re talking substantial sums of money. Even if you hit one of Lenovo’s awesome sales, the X201 won’t come cheap.
For a hardcore business user though, nothing this side of 4lbs can beat the ThinkPad’s combination of ruggedness, build quality, power, and battery life, and for that reason the extra few hundred dollars are definitely worth it for the people that care.
Alternative: HP EliteBook 2540p
The only other notebook line I’ve found with build quality even approaching the ThinkPad is HP’s new EliteBook lineup. The 2540p is the smallest EliteBook, a 12” unit like the Lenovo. It also has the standard voltage Core i5-540M, 2GB memory, and a 250GB hard drive at $1099. Also, you don’t have to pay extra for the webcam and touchpad. The aluminum panels on the palmrest and lid are nice, and the silver colour could suit some people’s tastes better than the all-black look of the ThinkPad. But it’s a bit heavier than the X201, starting at 3.4lbs, and has less battery life as well (7.5 hours on a 62 Wh 6 cell). The 2540p is still a great business portable, but it’s not on the level of the ThinkPad.
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Friendly0Fire - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
You're painting this as if it was losing its entire battery life in a matter of hours. I've read about 10-20% in a day, with some people claiming 2-5% with some tweaking. The former numbers are high but tolerable unless you're constantly on the go, while the latter numbers are fine by me.jtsarnak - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
I am constantly on the go. This is a luxury class laptop and billed as an ultra-portable business solution. ANY substantial loss after a day, be it 5% or 20%, is unacceptable. It's the only laptop I've ever owned that loses this much power overnight. Anything else doesn't lose that power in a WEEK's time.Alexo - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
Note: I am more interested in battery life than gaming performance so my comment is going to address that, but it is equally valid for other benchmarks.With the above in mind, I am quite disappointed with the article.
I came to associate AnandTech's articles, reviews and recommendation with rigorous testing.
However, of all the notebooks that claim long battery life, only the Asus U30jc was actually reviewed and hard numbers were given. For the rest of the recommendations, battery life times were either "extrapolated" based on assumptions (Asus UL?0jt) or worse -- taken from the manufacturers' claims. There were no measurements to verify the claims/assumptions and no real-life data was given.
If not a full comparative review, I expected to see at least a short comparison of measured performance. Especially since the actual user experience reported on various forums greatly varies.
After reading the article, I still have no idea how the RECOMMENDED U30jc, U35jc, UL30jt, 3820tg and X201 compare to each other in terms of performance and battery life.
Display quality was also glossed over. The article mentioned that most displays were bad but no mention was made which are better/worse than others.
All in all, I got the impression that some of the recommendations were based on press releases.
Vivek, can you get your hands on these models and give us some actual numbers?
Best regards,
Alex.
P.S.,
Another minor thing that I'd like to mention: The PL?0jt (the "business" version of the UL?0jt) is apparently available with matte displays.
SongEmu - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
I was impressed with the looks of the new HP Envy line, and was hoping they'd turned a new leaf in thermal management as well... guess not.Munna2002 - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
Thanks for a great list, but I still don't see a laptop that fits all of my criteria.1) Non-ULV i5/i7
2) Optimus technology
3) 13-15" screens
4) Decent non-Intel graphics card for light gaming
5) Pointing stick
6) (*Optional*) About 6 hours of battery life
The closest match that I see are Thinkpads T410, HP Elitebook 8440p, and Dell Latitude E6410. (but these don't have Optimus, and T410 has really bad battery life)
Suggestions anyone?
VivekGowri - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
All of the Asus U30/33/35 line is sold elsewhere with Core i5 processors. If you were so inclined, you could technically just buy a Core i5 or i7 processor and swap it in yourself. Or there's always the Sony Z.....LOL.Optimus is still in the ramping up stages, only a few makers have had the chance to use it by now, so give it a few months and as more of the fall releases hit, there should definitely be at least a few that fit your needs.
sam333 - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
I've been reading anandtech for quite some time and I've always felt that you are biased towards Intel giving them the publicity and advertising.Abt time if you gave a fair comparison.
rhys006 - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
Thanks for the post. I'm curious why you chose to flag 'heat' as an issue for the Envy 14? The developers realized that the previous versions had short comings in this area and modified the unit accordingly. I've been following owner forums since the Envy 14 came out and excessive heat has not been cited as an issue.Do you have more intel than we do?
batterycompanycomau - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
1. Most of the new Laptop Battery at the factory are set to sleep mode, the first boot with only about 5% of the electricity. You should not use an external power supply at this time, let the battery exhausted, until shutdown, then switch on the external ac adapter and the first charge had better over 15 hours. After fully charged, you should charge after the exhaustion of batter, the time of the second and third charge should be more than 12 hours, in order to activate TOSHIBA Laptop Battery and lay a good foundation for future use.2. TOSHIBA battery life is measured in terms of the number of charging and discharging. Do not enable the TOSHIBA Laptop Battery unless it is necessary, if you don't use the battery for a long time, you should charge it to about half full and place in a cool place to keep. If you enable the TOSHIBA battery, you should run out of power after the charging, and do not plug in the AC power before exhausted. When the TOSHIBA Laptop Battery fully charged, you should disconnect the AC input because overcharge will make the TOSHIBA battery overheat and that will shorten the TOSHIBA battery life.
3. Generally speaking, nowadays the laptop are with intelligent TOSHIBA battery protection, the TOSHIBA Laptop Battery will not be damaged due to normal operation, but still may damaged for the life-span of travelmate battery or other special reasons.
4. Lithium-ion TOSHIBA Laptop Battery should fast charge in constant current and then switch to slow charge in constant voltage when the voltage reaches a certain value. Usually the laptop doesn't have a strictly constant-current charge monitoring device. Charge current will turn small when system load large and vice versa, the current is decided by the TOSHIBA AC adapter power margin, it is obviously.
5. Discharge in a current as small as possible, the action is to slow down the CPU, stop the hard disk, adjust the screen to the most dark, and then do not run any programs until the laptop automatically shut down. The reason to emphasize the small current discharging is to prevent the TOSHIBA laptop premature detect the Laptop Battery voltage shortage.
www battery-company com au
matt b - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 - link
Given that numerous laptops 13.3 inchs and smaller are shipping with AMD nile dual core processors (K325 and K625), can we get a review of these? You must have some in your labs b/c you say that they still fall short of the Intel CULV processors on battery life. Can we see some actual reviews from Anandtech? I've seen mixed reviews on the internet. Toshiba has a 13.3 with the k625 that they claim gets over 6 hours of battery life. The k625 does not have bad performance, and in actual games (versus benchmarks like PC Vantage that Anandtech has shown that Intel's latest drivers have broken) the ATI 4225 cards are faster than Intel's. The price is right too. I'd like to see a i3 or CULV comparison using the same battery (one just not rated the same) versus the K625.My take from seeing the number of design wins was that Nile must be pretty impressive.