Ultralights aren't for everyone, but with the ThinkPad X220, Lenovo sure is doing its best to make the case that they can be.
This latest version of its super-slim executive standby is ThinkPad doing everything it does best. Still impossibly portable – at 3.3 pounds despite the bumped-up 12.5-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel display – Lenovo packs in everything a traveling professional (or just about anyone else) is likely to need.
The centerpiece is a new Core i5 Sandy Bridge processor, which upends the middling performance we usually expect from an ultralight. Benchmarks trounce just about everything we've tested of late – save for a few recent-vintage high-end machines – and they completely blow historical ultralight benchmarks out of the water, beating most machines with the last-generation chip by 30 to 40 percent.
What's more remarkable is that the chip's beefed up integrated graphics gave us a solid gaming experience on the machine, too, with performance clocking at or above what you'd normally get with a lower-end discrete graphics processor. Much has been said about the joys of Sandy Bridge already, of course, but to see it put to good use in such a compact machine is almost beyond words.
Beyond the i5, the machine's specs are totally up to code: 4 GB of RAM, 320-GB hard drive, SD and ExpressCard slots, and three USB ports (one chargeable). There's no optical drive and while there's no HDMI port, there is a DisplayPort socket, so plan your cabling accordingly. The keyboard is outstanding and typical of the ThinkPad brand. Audio isn't particularly inspiring but it's good enough for a machine of this stature.
Lenovo trumpets the X220's better-than-average battery life, but in our testing, it hit a mere 4:53 using the six-cell battery. Hardly epic, but that's still good. There are a few battery options available as upgrades if you want to stretch your work time.
