Lenovo ThinkPad X240 review: A no-nonsense business laptop

PCWorld - If Lenovo’s spendy ThinkPad X1 Carbon is the laptop every corporate drone craves, Lenovo’s thrifty ThinkPad X240 is the laptop their employer is more apt to spring for (assuming, of course, that the company’s IT department has standardized on Lenovo and not Dell, HP, Toshiba, or some other commercial laptop builder). 

You might think the ThinkPad X240 is too thick and too heavy to qualify for Ultrabook designation, but it’s only 0.79 inches thick and it weighs just 3 pounds. And there’s a very good reason why the X240 doesn’t taper to a knife edge like the X1 Carbon does: The X240 is outfitted with two batteries and a battery bridge that enables you to swap a depleted battery for one that’s fully charged without turning the machine off. That’s slick.

 

ROBERT CARDIN

Lenovo's ThinkPad X240 looks thick only next to wafer-thin notebooks like Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon. This machine is only 0.79 inches thick and it weighs three pounds.

PCWorld’s Worldbench suite rewards laptops equipped with SSDs—the configuration reviewed here includes a 256GB model—but the X240’s score of 282 leaves it slightly behind Dell’s XPS 12 Ultrabook Convertible (which has the same dual-core CPU) and Samsung’s Ativ Book 7 (which is powered by a third-generation Core i5-3337U, another dual core). This is a little surprising considering that the ThinkPad had twice as much DDR3/1600 memory: 8GB versus 4GB in the Dell and the Samsung.    Read More