T440s up on Lenovo website (IPS Screen, 1080p)

Lenovo have chosen for all of us

Physical separate buttons for volume/mute/mic (which were absolutely awesome and useful, with visual confirmation) have gone the way of the status lights. While I will not miss the status lights (rather pointless in 2013, as physical HDDs are disappearing, NumLock mode is gone from Lenovo, legitimate software that wants network connection or write smth to disk at random times is more frequent etc), the dedicated volume buttons were nice.

 

IPS doesn't seem to be present in a touch version or maybe just a misprint. The following configs are now available in HK for local students:

Non-touch
CPU Intel Core i7-4500U (1.8GHz, up to 3.0GHz / 4MB cache)
Operating System Windows® 8 64-bit (Eng, TC)
Chipset SoC
Memory 1 x 4GB DDR3L 1600MHz onboard +1 x 4GB DDR3L 1600MHz (Max. 12GB) / 0 Free Slots
Hard-Disk 500GB (7200rpm SATA HDD) +24G mSATA
Display 14" FHD IPS Backlight (1920 x 1080)
Graphic Control nVidia GeForce GT730 2G Graphics Dedicated
Optical Drive Optional External Drive Purchased Separately
Communication Gigabit Ethernet, Intel WIFI 7260 / Bluetooth 4.0
Ports / Media 3 x USB 3.0 / 1 x VGA / 1 x Mini Display port w/ audio/ 1 x Audio/Mic Combo Jack / 4-in-1 Card Reader (SD, SDHC, SDXC, MMC) / HD Webcam
Battery Lithium Ion 6-cell / Up to 8 hours (internal 3 cell + Slim 3 cell)
Dimension 331 (W) x 226 (D) x 20.65(H) mm / touch: 331 (W) x 226 (D) x 22.65(H) mm / Approx. 1.65kg / touch: Approx. 1.85kg
Warranty 3 years carry-in International Warranty/ 1 year for system battery / 1 year Protection Service

Touch
CPU Intel Core i7-4500U (1.8GHz, up to 3.0GHz / 4MB cache)
Operating System Windows® 8 64-bit (Eng, TC)
Chipset SoC
Memory 1 x 4GB DDR3L 1600MHz onboard +1 x 4GB DDR3L 1600MHz (Max. 12GB) / 0 Free Slots
Hard-Disk 500GB (7200rpm SATA HDD) +24G mSATA
Display 14" HD+ LED Backlight 10 points Multi Touch(1600 x 900)
Graphic Control nVidia GeForce GT730 2G Graphics Dedicated
Optical Drive Optional External Drive Purchased Separately
Communication Gigabit Ethernet, Intel WIFI 7260 / Bluetooth 4.0
Ports / Media 3 x USB 3.0 / 1 x VGA / 1 x Mini Display port w/ audio/ 1 x Audio/Mic Combo Jack / 4-in-1 Card Reader (SD, SDHC, SDXC, MMC) / HD Webcam
Battery Lithium Ion 6-cell / Up to 8 hours (internal 3 cell + Slim 3 cell)
Dimension 331 (W) x 226 (D) x 20.65(H) mm / touch: 331 (W) x 226 (D) x 22.65(H) mm / Approx. 1.65kg / touch: Approx. 1.85kg
Warranty 3 years carry-in International Warranty/ 1 year for system battery / 1 year Protection Service

Source

 

I say classic thinkpad with 7 rows keyboard, dedicated buttons (volume, thinkvantage), LEDs, and esp. the blue Enter key is far more sexier :thumbsup:

 

Achieving a 5-row keyboard? I don't think many ThinkPad users would consider that to be "spectacular".

S

 

Well, I have to say I like the newer design far more than the older - especially I don´t like the blue elements and the blue Enter key - but still, I like all ThinkPad designs, I like the newer just more.

There could be some irony inside this post.

 

interesting... both an X240 and X240s are available, but only the T440s and no 'regular' T440

 

As an IT guy, I'll miss the hell out of them. It's a quick first step in diagnosing performance issues, before even touching the machine.

 

Son is going away to college in the fall. I'm thinking T44s is worth waiting for - any reason this is not a good choice for college laptop? If you were not going to wait, what is a comparable laptop available today?

 

I like the Sony Vaio Pro 13:
Sony VAIO Pro Touch Ultrabooks | Sony USA

Lighter and thinner is always better for college.

The x1 carbon would be good if they had it avail with the 4th gen processors.

 

I second the Sony Pro 13, my girlfriend recently got it and it is pretty awesome. Most, if not all, of the early reported bugs are not present on new models as well.

 

Any idea when the laptop will be released? People say it'll come out in asia on the 20th. I'm really excited for a new laptop and I've decided that I will get this laptop.

 

I was told by Lenovo UK yesterday that it'll be three to four weeks.

I also asked about the T431s, which they don't have yet either. I was told that they're probably going to skip it and go straight to the T440s. Other resellers do have the T431s in the UK now, so it seems odd that Lenovo themselves don't.....

S

 

Im about to sell my T430s. The 440s seems to be my dream notebook. But then again Im not sure if I can trust Lenovo anymore. The T430s was quite a let-down for me. Battery-Life was pretty poor(Lenovo said 7 hours, 3 hours was its best), the screen was mid-range and the fan noise is pretty loud(3000 rpm idle, and thats minimum fan speed). This time I will wait for some reviews.

 

The awful battery situation can be observed with T410s, T420s and T430s. Zero improvement.

Dream?

 

Well, Notebookcheck says something different:
T400s: 3h 18min (WLAN)
T410s: 2h 32min (WLAN)
T420s: 3h 57min (WLAN)
T430s: 4h 37min (WLAN)

The one with the really short battery life was the T410s. I don´t know, but Croftpepp must do something wrong if he gets only 3hs with the T430s while surfing in the internet. According to Notebookcheck, you would get that if you watch a DVD.

 

Well, my name is not Notebookcheck. Any other sources with measurements for real use-cases?

Why takes side with some numbers and blame the real user? Maybe he should shake it thoroughly before use?

 

Maybe he has a bunch of crapware and miscellaneous processes running in the background, a bit like how my wife is constantly complaining about her smartphone's poor battery life when she has a bajillion apps running on it.

 

It's a shame because it looks like the T430s is gonna be the last slim(ish) T-series that still has the full complement of expansion options (ultrabay, mSATA, 2 RAM slots, optical drive, dedicated GPU). If they could have simply stuck a Haswell CPU in the T430s so it ran cooler and got better battery life and kept everything else the same I'd be all over it

The T440s specs are a little underwhelming so far. Better screen options are nice, but battery life (as quoted by Lenovo) seems only marginally better than the T430s and we lose many (not all) of the expansion options that made the T430s a great desktop replacement. Sure, the T440s looks sleeker IMO, but my impression is the Thinkpad function > form has now been flipped to form > function. My T420 spends most of its time in a dock at the back of my desk, so I really don't care what it looks like.

I wait with baited breath to see what the regular T440 offers, assuming one ever appears.

 

Well I got the i5 version and 3:30 hours with 50% display brightness is rly the best it can do. I usually have a web browser and a IDE like Eclipse or sometimes just a editor running.

 

Well: 95Wh max. Battery capacity (T440s) vs. 76Wh maximum (T430s) is more than "marginally better". Lenovo claims 6hs with video playback and 9hs of idle (Windows 8), with the normal 3-cell battery (47Wh). This means with the optional 6-cell battery you would get 18h of idle and 12h of full HD video playback (since you have twice as much battery capacity).

Well, you only loose one RAM slot and the UltraBay in comparison with the T430s.

 

^^ For some (myself included) single ram slot is already a deal breaker.

 

The battery life quote I've seen for the T440s (3+3 cell) is "up to 8hrs", which is admittedly more than marginally better than the T430s with the standard 6-cell, but estimated battery life is usually vastly overstated by manufacturers so are we really gonna see more than 4-5 hours? Let's wait for the reviews

Losing a RAM slot and the ultrabay and the mSATA is a huge deal for many people, me included. I currently run a dual-drive system (mSATA + HDD) and have the option for a three-drive system with the ultrabay. Depending on requirements I can also run an additional battery in the ultrabay or an optical drive, offering a huge amount of flexibility. Hopefully the new M.2 format SSDs will offer comparable capacity/price to the mSATA ones so at least a dual-drive system will still be possible. And hopefully the "regular" T440 will still have an ultrabay.

Obviously YMMV, but that hardware flexibility is far more important to me than a better screen since my T420 is usually driving a 24" IPS monitor anyway.

 

I am going to have to agree with the other user. On another forums the T430s was consistently around the 3-4.5 hour battery life. Let's say some of htem really had apps/processes runnning in the back.. That is still well under lenvoo's estimates no matter how you look at it. I'll take several users real world experiences over one website.

 

I really hope the dual battery life is not rated at 8 hours. I want the standard battery to be 5-6 hours. I figured if the T430s which gets 3-4 hours the Haswell should hopefully get 5-6. I thought Lenovo was quoting 12 hours with the dual battery. Also if the battery is non-usereplacable how is one able to get dual battery on the T440s. Also the only reason I have not gotten the T431s is because of the IPS screen so that is a must.

 

The T440s can still be upgraded to 12 GB of RAM.

Get used to this setup (4 GB + one slot), because there will be many Haswell machines with this RAM arrangement.

I really don´t know where you found that. Lenovo japan says "Up to 10.4hrs", and the official datasheet says "Up to 9 hours on Windows 8 Idle; Up to 6 hours on full HD playback".

The bigger maximum battery capacity is a fact that can´t be ignored.

You can guess about the T440s battery life if you look on other ULV Haswell based machines, such as the Sony Vaio Pro 13: Review Sony Vaio Pro 13 SVP-1321C5ER Ultrabook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews It gets 5hrs and 16min with a much smaller battery (36Wh vs. 47Wh on the T440s). My guess is: You will get 7hrs of battery life on the T440s (with the normal battery) with average use.

Well if you currently use an T420, why even look on the new T4xxs line? You should be more focused on the T440p, which will be the successor of the normal T4xx.

 

True. Those who actually use T430s say "3 hours plus" and don't need to refer to any frickin' numbers from any frickin' websites.

 

I was quoting the specs posted a couple pages ago from the HK student site. Sounds like even Lenovo's quotes are all over the place

I'm still not convinced a "p" version of the T440 will appear despite sightings in the wild of alleged product sheets, but I'll snap one up if it does (assuming it has an ultrabay in addition to a decent GPU and quad-core CPU). Surely the market for "p" T-series machines has now migrated to the W series, however. My interest in the T440s is kinda academic and more about seeing what might go into the T440 and the fact I was about to buy a T430s before I heard the T440 line was imminent.

 

Yeah, that's part of my frustration, need 16GB min, preferably more. I was hoping business sector wouldn't get affected by the slimness plague....

 

Another thing to think about is that you will probably lose performance (estimated 10%) going from 8GB RAM to 12GB RAM as you will lose the advantage of having dual channel RAM. To use the "Dual Channel" feature of motherboards, you need to have identical sets of RAM in each slot.

Here is a better description of the whole thing:
Crucial FAQ - Answer

 

No.

Dual-channel will still be enabled, but running in asynchronous (aka asymmetric) mode, as opposed to synchronous (symmetric) which would require two identical DIMMs.

 

Please reread the link from Crucial (a leading manufacturer of RAM) "You can install a single [or non matching] memory module; it just won't be utilizing dual-channel mode"

 

duplicate post (please delete)

 

No need for me to re-read anything regarding this particular issue....

I've got about a dozen laptops - mostly ThinkPads - with such configurations and they *do* run as dual-channel.

Definitions here:

Old article, but the principle still stands - the quote is from here: LGA775: New CPUs and Chipsets. Page 7 - X-bit labs

And Intel said:

Once again, an old source, but the principle still stands: http://download.intel.com/design/chipsets/datashts/30146705.pdf

I've been debating this issue on various forums since DDR2 was first introduced...

 

No doubt you've done some research on the topic although your own quotes support the premise of my original post (that there will be a performance penalty in not having identical RAM in both slots).

From your article above. "Although the system will try to take advantage of the dual-channel mode in this case, the performance will still be close to that of the single-channel mode. "

 

I never said that the performance would be exactly the same between asymmetric and symmetric configurations - that we agree upon.

How big is the difference, though?

Take a look here:

Synthetic Benchmarks - Parallel Processing, Part 2: RAM and HDD

Don't get me wrong: soldered-on-DIMMs make me grab the airplane sickness bag. Come to think of it, most of Lenovo's products nowadays have the same effect on silly old me...

 

Incidentally Haswell has been said to mostly improve idle power consumption and going into low power states more often, not load power consumption because there's not really that much you can do there, so just going to Haswell isn't some magic battery life boost like people seem to think. Like any other laptop we'll have to wait for real user reviews to find out real world battery life, and this time it may be more affected by workload than other processors in the past.

 

Glad we agree somewhere

I've also had numerous ThinkPads for the past 15+ years and so I'm always trying to squeeze out every bit of performance as they were always a bit behind their desktop counterparts.

It is tough to quantify the performance difference of different memory configurations, especially as memory gets faster and more complex, I tend to follow the manufacturers recommendation of doing things in pairs. I've lost track of the latest processor/memory architectures (on die, off die, FSB, etc.) so I just want to keep things simple.

Would be great if someone could do some performance testing on different configurations. Most likely though it will be imperceptible to the end user but it is nice knowing that you have the fastest configuration at the time of your build (even if it is a few percentage points).

 

Well, that being the case I'm certain you remember hacking the internal (soldered) RAM on 240 series in order to get full 256MB instead of 192...those were the days...

Nothing wrong with keeping things simple. I was just pointing out that not "all is lost" when it comes to dual-channel and different sized DIMMs...

Bragging rights - even for one's own use - are always a good thing. For my FrankenPads I always use matched DIMMs but for stuff that does boring work on daily basis..."who cares" is my attitude...LOL

 

4GB module + 8GB module.

Misinformation.

THIS.

Memory controllers have been smarter.

It's prudent to purge old information from our old heads, as Hamlet of Shakespeare declares, "... from the table of my memory, I'll wipe away all trivial fond records ..."

 

Lenovo Quick Pick lists most of coming Haswell ThinkPads and T440p is amongst them (its even got MTM of 20aw and 20an). Additionally, Lenovo has passed wireless certification for models L440, L540, T440, T440p, T440s, X240s, X240 Welcome to PTCRB -- How would you still doubt this?

My bet is early September announcement going next to or even right after Intel's presentation of Haswell M-Series CPUs during IDF San Francisco, Sep 3rd...4th.

 

Take a look at the Gigabyte P34G.

 

The IDF is not from September 3rd-4th, its from September 10-12: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us...an-francisco/2013/idf-2013-san-francisco.html The next Lenovo Webinar will be held on September 11. I would guess they will announce the new lineup then.


The T440p is confirmed to have an DVD drive/UltraBay:

Business Computers | Buy Lenovo Computers Laptops | ThinkPad Notebooks | ThinkStation Workstations & ThinkServer Servers

 

Yes, my bad -- curiosity on the new Intel and Lenovo line-ups is strong enough to shift IDF timeline 1 week earlier.
You're absolutely right, it scheduled on Sep 10..12.

I've seeing this link couple of days ago and it looks like completely fake to me: why the hell on Earth T440 got an "Ultrabook" badge? why optical drive presence is the only differentiator between T440 and T440p? Is T440p is an Ultrabook with DVD combo? If that's true my frustration will have no limits... No, that's fake. It's not a T440/T440p.

 

I don´t think its a fake. The "normal T440" will be obviously only a bit thicker and cheaper T440s (just like the X240 is a thicker and cheaper version of the X240s, but with removable battery and also very likely with a Docking-Port).

If you look on this page (under "Battery services"), T440 will get the "sealed battery replacement warrantys", just like the T440s, and unlike the T440p.

T440p will really replace the T430, with a chassis that is as thick as the T430´s chassis and a DVD drive. T440 and T440s will replace the T430s, T440s is the premium model.

 

Appreciate your way of thinking but Quick Pick is not reliable yet -- Lenovo is entering this data right at the moment -- those sections appeared couple of days ago and they were completely blank, last night...this early morning support services started to be added, no accessories were added yet and presumably they will be there few days later. Let's wait couple of days and double-check this point once again.

Anyway, sealed battery on T440 is kind of disappointment: this means that Lenovo got rid of some guts like ExpressCard slot or additional memory slot or something else... This is just stupid in the machine that _never_ was an ultrabook (and I hope nobody expected it to be an ultrabook though).

 

I'm really disappointed to see the T440 is likely an ultrabook. It seems Lenovo has fully thrown out the function over form approach to design.

My last hope is that the T440p uses a T4x0s-style chassis and not the T4x0-style one. The T4x0s design is just about the perfect combination of size and flexibility for me, and if Haswell is available in it, that buys me a few more years for some other manufacturer to pick up where Lenovo's dropping the ball.

 

Lenovo did this many years ago. Now they are just doing what they've planned.

"World's largest PC manufacturer" and "function over form" can not live together.

 

Arguably they can if Lenovo wants to remain serious about the corporate business, which is still huge. Lenovo has plenty of consumer-oriented laptops. IMO if they start to "consumerize" the business machines they'll see their corporate sales slowly dwindle.

Take sealed batteries for example. Employee leaves laptop in hot car multiple times and the internal battery is as good as dead. So now the company has to send the machine off to Lenovo for a new battery (or pay extra for onsite warranty) instead of IT simply swapping in a new one?

 

Funny, ThinkPads have always been focused on a balance of form and function, not on blind function over form like you suggest. Richard Sapper designed the ThinkPad with that approach.

Just because they are dropping the optical drive doesn´t mean the do pure "form over function" from now on It is a fact that the optical drive is not used anymore they way it was some years ago, many people don´t need one anymore, so why should Lenovo keep it? They are still providing it in the heavier machines (T440p) for the companies and people who still need one, but it is a reasonable decision that they will dropp it on the lighter ones (it makes the Notebook heavier and is an unnecessary weak point in the chassis architecture).

I don think this is going to happen at all. The T440p replaces the T430, not the T430s, although the T440p might be a tad thinner than the T430 (and smaller, since it will use the same footprint as T440s and T431s, a 14" display in a 13" sized chassis).

Sidenote: The codename of the T440p is "ThinkPad Oasis-1". Back in Dezember 2012, I posted a picture here that I found on Twitter (from a Lenovo employee): http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo/700739-new-thinkpads-rogue-oasis-santana.html#post8995662 I think we can see an early prototype of the T440p there, if I am right.

 

Yes, I think so. BTW, is it me or helding some P.R.-event on 9/11 is not that good idea from Lenovo USA?