The thought of a ThinkPad netbook is enough to make anyone even vaguely familiar with Lenovo suspicious, but according to ThinkPadToday that’s exactly what the company have up their corporate sleeve. They’re claiming that the rumored ThinkPad X200e will actually drop as the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e on January 5th 2010, with the tagline “Entry level ultra portable, the first ThinkPad of its size”.
Lenovo is known for making some robust notebooks that perform well but have zero sex appeal. The machines have looked basically the same since IBM owned the ThinkPad brand. Today Lenovo announced that it has added Windows 7 to a couple new machines called the SL410 and the SL510. The notebooks hit overseas already, but today is the official U.S. coming out.
Lenovo have announced two new ThinkPads, each with multitouch-capable touchscreens. The ThinkPad T400s and ThinkPad X200 Tablet can recognize four and two finger touches respectively, and come with Lenovo’s new SimpleTap control panel that offers chunky, fingertip access to volume, system settings, applications and bookmarks.
Lenovo’s ThinkPad T400s has only just crossed the wire – check out our review here – but the company is already thinking one or two steps ahead to what its replacement might have. According to David Critchley, a marketing manager at the PC maker, both multitouch display technology and an OLED panel are being considered for future models.
Straddling the divide between ultraportable and mainstream notebook, Lenovo’s ThinkPad T400s squeezes a business-friendly 14.1-inch LED-backlit display, Intel Core 2 Duo processor and integrated WWAN into a chassis just 0.83-inches thick. SlashGear had the opportunity for a pre-release hands-on; check out our first impressions after the cut, together with some preliminary T400s benchmarks.
Considering a new Lenovo ThinkPad in the next nine months? You’ll be interested in the latest leaked notebook roadmap from the company, then, which tips such delights as the Lenovo ThinkPad T400 – which we last saw being run over by a 26k pound truck – as dropping in mid-July, plus a storm of new Intel Calpella-based machines arriving in early 2010.
The first image and set of rumored specs for the ThinkPad T400s was leaked a few days ago. While Lenovo is still mum about the release date, price or specs come these two videos of the T400s. The first video demonstrates just how well built and tough this thing is. No worries, I won’t spoil the ending for you – just make sure to click on over to watch it get run over by a 26,000 pound DOW truck. The second video shows the T400s getting physically abused by the “tornado chasing” team members. It’s a crime treating such a great laptop this way!
We got a look at the latest Lenovo ThinkPad T400s today now that new images have leaked out. This new slim model is only 0.83-inches thick, bringing down the size considerably from the 1.12-inch thick original T400 model.
UPDATE: Lenovo ThinkPad T400s laptop review (SlashGear.com)
Lenovo Canada are offering ThinkPad X200 Tablet PC buyers a newly-expanded range of processor options, more than twice as many as US buyers can configure their touchscreen ultraportables with. The Canadian X200 gets not only a choice of the original SU9300 1.20GHz and SL9400 1.86GHz CPUs as the US model, but up to a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo SL9600 low-voltage chip.
According to a leak, Lenovo is apparently working on a new ThinkPad X200 that features a CULV processor. While this rumor is not confirmed, it would make sense since Lenovo has themselves admitted they are thinking about creating a CULV ThinkPad in the future, though they did not commit to a timeframe.
The ThinkPad X200 models currently feature a SL-series Core 2 Duo processor. This has made the price go up considerably, but with a 1.2GHz Celeron M chip, the cost would decrease, as would the voltage use. The new system would also have a 160GB hard drive and 2GB of memory.
Pricing is not known, nor is a release date. It may not even come to pass. We’ll just have to wait and see. But it would make sense in this economy for Lenovo to be looking to drop their price point a bit.
JP
