NEW YORK — News of the super-thin Lenovo ThinkPad X1 notebook may have leaked weeks ago, but that didn’t stop the company from giving a proper, enthusiastic welcome to the notebook it’s calling one of its most interesting products ever.
At a dinner here for members of the press May 11, Lenovo executives showed off the X1—arguably its answer to the Apple MacBook Air—as well as a new Apple iMac competitor, the ThinkCentre Edge 91z all-in-one desktop. In both cases, Lenovo—whose secure, enterprise-geared and surprisingly rugged devices have never been accused of being sexy—paid a little more attention to the beyond-business design details and added features that make for more well-rounded machines.
"When we set out to design the X1, we wanted to create the thinnest ThinkPad we’d ever created," Dilip Bhatia, vice president of Lenovo’s Think Product Group, told those assembled at the event, adding that what they were seeing was the culmination of 15 months of work. "We wanted to set a trend, a new direction, that business notebooks don’t have to be boring."
For the first time on a business notebook, Lenovo included Dolby Home Theater v4 sound and other small niceties like a backlit keyboard. The business traveler can only send so many emails, Bhatia said. "At the end of the day, I want to watch a movie."
Another perk for the traveler: Starting weight for the X1 is 3.7 pounds. It also features a scratch-resistant 13.3-inch Superbright Infinity LCD display with Corning Gorilla Glass (to emphasize that first point, Bhatia dragged a key across the display, to no effect), and users have a choice of 2nd-Generation Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors running at 2.5GHz—normally only an option in 14- and 15-inch Lenovo laptops.
"This engineering allows the ThinkPad X1 laptop to double the CPU performance and quadruple the graphics performance of the ThinkPad X301, Lenovo’s previous flagship 13-inch laptop," the company said in a May 17 statement.
For more, read the eWEEK article: Lenovo ThinkPad X1, 91z PC: Where Business Meets Pleasure.