Lenovo ThinkPad X130e
For a rugged, throw-around portable laptop, the X130e fills a role. Fashion aside, the only real irksome point is the touch pad. If you're a ThinkPad lover, you'll likely enjoy using it.
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| The Good |
Matte screen Decent battery life Will likely survive a small hurricane |
|---|---|
| The Bad |
Touch pad can be finnicky Bulky Lenovo aesthetics as always will be polarising |
Lenovo's ThinkPad X130e is small, but chunky. It very much wears its business face, as all ThinkPads forever have done. With its matte screen, distinctive Lenovo keyboard and track stick, you know already whether this is the sort of laptop that appeals to you.
The 11.6-inch, 1366x768 screen is decent enough, the matte screen a welcome addition to ward off glare. While the keyboard is excellent, Lenovo's hinged click pad is frustrating, sometimes actuating right button clicks when you don't want them, and the textured surface impedes two-finger scrolling, often not registering the movement. You'll end up using the buttons above the touch pad, intended for use with the track stick, purely to increase reliability.
Options are modest port-wise, with three USB 2.0 ports, an SD card reader, VGA and HDMI out, gigabit Ethernet and a headset jack. Bluetooth and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi give you wireless connectivity.
Our review sample is intended for the education market; a Celeron 857 at 1.2GHz, 2GB of RAM and 320GB hard drive is a step down from the retail model, which includes a Core i3 2367M at 1.4GHz. Spend a little more, and you'll get a 128GB SSD swapped in, and 4GB of RAM.
Application performance
Choose a benchmark: Handbrake | iTunes | Photoshop | Multimedia
The Celeron chip falls almost approximately halfway between AMD's E-450 and the Core i5 chip that's contained in most ultrabooks.
Battery life
Battery life is quite good on the X130e, but, given the low specs, we'd expect that. It manages to get almost as good battery life as HP's Pavilion dm1, despite being a better performer.
Conclusion
For a rugged, throw-around portable laptop, the X130e fills a role. Fashion aside, the only real irksome point is the touch pad. If you're a ThinkPad lover, you'll likely enjoy using it.
Latest comments (Add your comment)
But does the lack of buttons/touchad emulated buttons matter in the real world, many would not realise they are missing something unless it is mentioned to them?
There are many great Thinkpad deals in the 499 to 799 range at the moment and that includes the higher specced version X130e and the E420/430/520/520 which offer additional features at the same price as some other brand name consumer notebooks, however a SOHO/SMB oriented Thinkpad may not be the taste to some.
Check the wifi on your sample, the education sector is over-obessed with 5GHz N