ThinkPad X200s First Impressions

I've posted some of this information in another thread (X200s shipping status) but thought it may be helpful to put this in its own topic since there is currently a shortage of review information on the X200s.

X200s ordered: 10/7
Shipped: 10/18
Delivered: 10/20

Specifications:
SL9400 1.86GHz, 6MB L2, 1066MHz FSB
WXGA+ (1440x900) LED backlight
3GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1067MHz
160GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
Intel Turbo Memory 2GB
X200 Ultrabase
3-1 Media Card Reader
Bluetooth
6 cell Li-Ion Battery (9-cell also ordered)

My last two Thinkpads were an X61 and a T61. Both were fine laptops, but I vastly prefer this little X200s and here's why.

It's very light. When I left work with it the first time, I thought I had forgotten to put it in my bag. It's a featherweight with the 6-cell battery (for which there was no cost difference from the 4-cell battery at the time I placed the order) and still very acceptably light with the 9-cell battery. Carry both cells and you have a laptop with minimally 10+ hours of life and much more if you run the screen at 50% brightness and wireless disabled. I'm traveling to American Samoa (about 16 hours of flight time from NY) next month and wanted this machine for its light weight and stellar battery life.

The battery life is fantastic - in the first two discharges I've gotten 3.5 hours from a 6-cell battery and 6 hours from a 9-cell battery. I'm not getting the life that Lenovo claims, but that may be influenced by a few factors -- it's brand new and they tend to get better after a few cycles, I was running the screen at 80% brightness, and had the wireless radio on. I'm guessing that with less screen brightness and no wireless, it would get 10+ hours on the 9-cell. In the 5th picture below you can see that it has very little "bar" left in the battery icon in the taskbar and yet it still had over an hour of life left. Right now, I've just woken up and unplugged it, and it (9 cell) is showing 100% charge and 7:30 of life. Nice!

I bought the unit directly from Lenovo. I asked our corporate sales rep about the hinge color and he said he was only aware that they were available in silver so I guess there is conflicting reports on this. It didn't matter to me either way. Actually I guess I prefer the silver as it breaks up what is otherwise an almost entirely black laptop.

The keyboard is excellent. There is no flex and it feels better than the T61 it replaced. I've mashed the left, center, and right side and can detect no give whatsoever. The keyboard is magnificent and may be the best I've ever had. It is head and shoulders better than the Dell Latitude D630, XPS M1330, and XPS M1530 I tried earlier this year. The XPS units in particular had a soft, mushy, cheap feel to them. This one has a superb tactile feel to it.

The screen is crisp and considerably brighter than the T61. The 1440x900 resolution is great (the low resolution was the reason I got rid of the X61). I work with homegrown imaging software (photographs of medical conditions / diseases) and the color reproduction is excellent. The contrast is good, not great, but very satisfactory.

Performance is fantastic. Although I do a lot of multitasking, I don't run many big footprint apps. But this machine easily juggles Firefox with a handful of tabs, Excel, Word, Outlook, MySQL-Front, CYGWIN, Photoshop, Digsby, iTunes, and WinSCP all at once.

The only thing I wish it (or the Ultrabse) had was a DVI port. Although I bought the Ultrabase, display quality through VGA on a 26" monitor at 1990 is not great. The Ultrabase has a Displayport and I have now ordered a DVI/Displayport adapter.

So far, I am very pleased with the X200s. It lives up to my expectations and I suspect I will carry this laptop for quite a while. The cost was $1800 out the door with tax, shipping, the specs posted above, and MS Office.

Some pictures for your viewing pleasure:

 

kboyer, thanks for the review and imperssions.

I've got some minor questions and I would like to know if you've noticed them already as some other members noticed.

1. I've understand that you're watching images most of the days, but what about videos? especially divx and other compressed formats. what is your impression on quality?
2. did you noticed the scratchings over time near the fingerprint reader?

 

The few videos I've watched have been fine, but I haven't really paid attention to the quality versus compression comparison.

I didn't order this unit with the fingerprint reader. I've had them on other ThinkPads and wasn't impressed. My prints aren't very deep and it took way too many swipes to get a successful read.

 

Ok, just wanted to see how video looked liked. Thanks for your input.

 

Kboyer,

Do you have the same problem as me with the 6cell battery being loose ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U9mTk4d3S0

 

It has about 1/32th of inch play in it. Certainly not anything I'd be worried or bothered by however. -Ken

 

Great review kboyer, your efforts are much appreciated

Edit: Question, the battery shown on the pictures is a 6-cell right? As far as I can see, it doesn't sit flush with the machine which is a difference compared to the x200 I believe?

Edit 2: nvm, re-read your post, it appears the pictures are with the 9-cell "installed". Could you still verify that the 6-cell sits flush? ^^

 

The battery shown in the pics is the 9-cell. The 6-cell sits flush in the back but does protrude from the bottom raising the rear of the laptop a bit, which is actually kind of nice for typing.

 

that much resolution on a 12.1" inch screen... wow.... are you having trouble after long exposures to the screen?

 

Not at all. The brightness helps, no doubt. But I love high resolution. I couldn't stand using the X61 with its measly 1024x768 resolution. And when I'm at work, it's docked to a 26" monitor running 1990 lines of resolution.

 

Kboyer,
Are you doing cpu intensive tasks the whole time while on the 3.5 hour charge with the 6 cell? 3.5 hours to me sounds very short in comparison to the claimed 8 hours even with max screen brightness and wifi.

 

Yes, many of the apps listed in the post are pretty CPU intensive. And each time I use a cell, the life gets a bit better. I've never had a laptop that can run over 7 hours on a single battery with the wireless radio on, so I'm very pleased.

 

Having your brightness so high is what is giving you less battery life. Most of us who run the x200 with 8-9hrs of life with wifi ON have out displays set to about half brightness.

 

That is correct. I would get about 8.5 hours on the x200 with the 9 cell, brigthness at 5/15, wi-fi on, and CPU set to slow while performing web browsing, document creation etc. Running a more intensive task (media editing/playback, compression, games, etc.) would lower the battery life as would increasing display brightness.

 

Can the x200s play 1080p h264 files just fine?

 

Just tried out a movie trailer and it played fine.

 

What's the responsiveness like on the SL9400? I mean, does basic usage like opening programs or files "feel" like you're doing it on low voltage processor?

 

Thanks, I will pick one up when the prices drop a little more.

 

I am interested in the effects of the high DPI of the screen.

I have used a 15" T60p with an UXGA screen (having approx 133 DPI as compared to the 140 DPI of your X200s). I found 133 DPI to be the perfect resolution (for me and for Windows XP) as I did not need to adjust font size or use zoom in applications. When you work with 140 DPI, do you find yourself forced to increase icon sizes, font sizes etc, in order to facilitate legibility and usability?

 

I'm coming off a T61 with the T9300 and this little guy seems to be just as fast, with maybe a slight difference in favor of the T61. But for app startups, it's very fast and if I didn't know that this was a low voltage processor, I sure wouldn't have guessed it from performance.

 

I'm still playing with this to be honest. At home, the screen is only about 18" inches from my eyes and it's fine. At work, the machine is further away due to the Ultrabase and a keyboard in front of it. I noticed myself leaning toward the screen too much this week. But I wasn't wearing my cheaters either. Icon sizes are fine, but I need to use this machine some more (wearing my reading glasses) before I'll know if font sizes need to be bumped. I'd guess it'll be fine though.

 

You have an ultrabase and work can't provide you with a monitor?

 

Yes, I have a 26" monitor attached to the Ultrabase, but I like to have both monitors in use.

 

Quick update on battery life - I ran the laptop with the 9-cell all weekend. Screen brightness makes a huge difference as someone above said. By dropping the brightness down to 7 out of 15 bars, I was able to get nearly 10 hours out of it. This was with wireless and Bluetooth turned on.

Does anyone know how much battery draw the Bluetooth radio uses?

 

Thanks for the pics. How about a nice big one of the screen at full brightness if you don't mind? I have to say I'm kind of jealous.

 

I don't have the answer to that but you can set your power manager to show power being drawn and then play with shutting off / turning on your bluetooth radio.

Edit: I order my X200s from Provantage today! Can't wait!

 

How fast something opens is usually determined by the hard drive, not the CPU.

 

I'm trying to get some pics for you but they aren't turning out well. Shooting with a Nikon D40 DSLR but the images have heavy lines throughout no matter if they are taken with or without flash. It may be capturing the LED refreshing like taking a video of a monitor and the lines you get? If you can tell me how to do this, I'll be glad to try.

 

ZaZ is right, hard drives (random access time) tends to be the determining factor. The low-voltage CPU will only increase the time taken by processor dependent tasks (audio/video encoding, file compression, photoshop filters, etc.) and lower the performance of applications like games that can max out a processor for long stretches of time. However, a low voltage processor should have little to no effect on more basic tasks (web browsers, video playback, M$ Office, etc.). You will actually notice that even a low voltage processor tends to dynamically undervolt most of the time (my x200 normal was at only 800 MHz out of 2.4 GHz most of the time, and my T40 was usually at 600 MHz out of 1.5 GHz even 5 years after I bought it).

 

Unfortunately I'm not a camera guru. I just got a 7MP, which is way more than I need.

 

I find the 6-cell battery somewhat uncomfortable when using my x200s on my lap. The battery is thicker than the rest of the laptop but only extends across 3/4 of the width: this means the left and right sides of the bottom are different height.

I just did my first session on battery power: after 3 hours I'm down to 33% remaining (screen brightness at 8/15, mostly using wireless for reading email and web browsing).

 

You should be able to get better battery life than that. After 3 hours with those settings you should have at least 50% remaining.

I do agree that the bulge is less than ideal. It would be a lot nicer if it was the whole width of the notebook (the same goes for the 9 cell only sticking out on 3/4 of the back). This is actually one of the nice things about the x200 tablet. The laptop is a little thicker and heavier all the time, but neither the 4 cell or 8 cell increase its height, and the 8 cell covers the whole width. This should make the x200t more balanced than the x200 or x200s (with either 6 cell or 9 cell).

 

If you have a tripod try this: set the lowest ISO and, in Av mode, the smallest aperture, i.e. f/11 or f/16 - the camera should set the time long enough to capture the screen contents without artifacts.

PS
Amazingly, I consider X200s + UB as an alternative to W700 - which I thought - would be an ultimate machine for me. It used to be - until I saw a laptop and a really good 24'' LCD...

 

Do you find the ThinkVantage software reliable?

Power Manager seems to be a joke: the UI is nonresponsive (e.g. select a different plan and it takes 30 seconds to react) and buggy (it reverts to default settings and loses my changes).

Access connections sometimes turns off the wireless.

The fingerprint login utility gives an unhelpful error message "The machine name is invalid" when you try to login after renaming your computer - you need to re-enroll. Oh, and there are 2 copies of the text "Please Wait" on the login screen.

I'll stick with them for a while, but so far I'm not too impressed.

 

I like the older version of the Thinkvantage software better. I don't have a fingerprint reader - had one on a previous Thinkpad and wasn't impressed - so I've never used the new version of that app. Power Manager has been stable for me, but the new Access Connections is slow and it displays the 'Not Responding' message too often (it comes back to life but takes entirely too long). it has never powered off the radio though - are you sure that wasn't the Power Manager doing that while on battery power?

That said, it's still all better than the Windows counterparts.

 

I think it happened after a resume from sleep.

 

Hi,
I dont know, but is there some people who had used WXGA screen X200s? Like in Canada Lenovo web site, where the x200 are? How much battery increase with no LED screen? And another question is that if that model has a carbon fiber roll-cage? I mean no LED screen X200s.