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Lenovo ThinkPad T400s All-Purpose Laptop

23.06.2009
The Lenovo ThinkPad T400s (the "s" could stand for "small," or maybe even "surprising") is an evolutionary step up from the , which is itself a good all-purpose business laptop. In fact, the T400s looks as if it were a T400 that someone had left in the dryer for too long. So how did Lenovo improve on a laptop that already offered a great balance of features? For starters, it slimmed down the profile (big time), beefed up the ports, and integrated GOBI (for Wireless WAN access).

Measuring 0.8 inches thick and sporting a starting weight of 4 pounds, the T400s is one of the lighter all-purpose laptops around. It makes the old T400 (at 1.5 inches thick and around 6.5 pounds) look downright big-boned. What's even more impressive is that the T400s still manages to squeeze in a lot of the extras that business users require. This model is literally lined with ports. Whether it's the five-in-one flash card reader or the space allotted for a 9.5mm DVD-ROM burner (or Blu-ray option), this machine has you covered. It even has stuff that might seem like overkill, such as VGA and a DisplayPort option, but even that gives you the opportunity to plug in two monitors. I'm personally a big fan of the built-in USB/eSATA port, which is perfect for high-speed data jockeys. (What I'd love to see in the next iteration is more than one pass-through USB charge port for powering USB devices while the laptop is off; for anyone with too many gadgets and power supplies, this feature is incredibly handy.)

The ThinkPad T400s earned a sound mark of 112 in our WorldBench 6 test suite, smoking the trim (and many of the other in our Top 10, for that matter) and coming in about 20 points faster than the T400. Applications loaded swiftly on the 128GB SSD hard drive, which uses an Intel Core 2 Duo SP9600 processor with 2GB of RAM. To help cut down the size of the system, however, the company dropped the discrete graphics card. That downshift to Intel's integrated graphics will prevent you from using the T400s for games. But this is a business box, after all.

The nine-cell battery that gave the T400 its incredible longevity is gone. Our test unit came with a six-cell battery as standard, with no word of larger batteries on the way. As a result, this laptop managed to survive only 5 hours in our battery tests. Not a horrible result, just something to keep in mind when you're preparing for your next cross-country flight.

Showing off a bright 1440 by 900 pixels, the 14.1-inch, LED-backlit screen is an eye-catcher indoors and out. Like the T400, the T400s uses a matte coating, as opposed to a flashy, glossy surface that looks good only indoors. Examining the two side by side, I found that the T400s's screen was sharper; sky blues, for example, popped more and looked richer on the T400s. One mechanical quirk I noticed, though, is that the hinge of the T400s is a little loosey-goosey. If you're sitting at a desk, that's not much of a problem--but if you encounter any turbulence midflight, the screen can flop back.

The keyboard is typical Lenovo fare--excellent. But that doesn't mean Lenovo coasted. For instance, two of the keys I use a little more often that I should admit--Esc and Del--doubled in size. The designers also managed to retain all the buttons from the larger, thicker T400 and still make room for a handy microphone-mute button (more on that in a minute).