Notice: Minor Cosmetic Imperfections.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X240 is a powerful business laptop sporting a Core i5 Haswell CPU, a speedy solid-state drive, and a 12.5-inch IPS touch-screen display. You'll pay top dollar for this well-built ultrabook, but it'll give you over 15 hours of battery life in return.
Design and Features
Longtime fans of the ThinkPad will be happy to know that the X240 doesn't stray too far from the iconic design, although it does offer a few new touches. The lid is made of carbon fiber and has a new Graphite Black finish, which is a bit smoother than the typical ThinkPad finish. It also uses a drop-down hinge design that allows the screen to be extended to a 180-degree tilt range. As always, ThinkPad and Lenovo badges adorn the lid.
The X240 has a built-in, non-removable 3-cell battery and comes with a removable 3-cell battery and a removable 6-cell battery, both of which are hot-swappable thanks to Lenovo's Power Bridge Technology, which allows you to replace a spent battery with a charged battery without powering down the notebook.
Beneath the lid is a 12.5-inch IPS touch-screen display that delivers vibrant colors, deep blacks, and wide viewing angles. However, its 1366-by-768 resolution pales in comparison to the 3,200-by-1,800 resolution you get with the Samsung Book 9. That said, the touch screen worked flawlessly, and the display's uber-thin bezels made for easy Windows 8 swiping from either side.
The island-style keyboard is a typical ThinkPad keyboard; in other words, it is awesome. The backlit keys are full-size and well spaced, and the keyboard is spill-resistant. Typing is comfortable, and keystrokes are responsive. The newly designed glass trackpad offers twice the work area of previous trackpads, contains five integrated click buttons, and supports 20 Windows 8 gesture commands. I takes a little getting used to the extra surface area but once you do it's hard to image how you ever got along with a smaller trackpad. As always, a red TrackPoint pointing stick is nestled between the G, H, and B keys, and there's a fingerprint reader off to the right side of the keyboard.