Nosy neighbors to the sides see only black. The third’s display is polarized so that it can only be viewed head-on. Another Carbon model has a brilliant 4K display, one of the first ultraportable units to feature one.
The unit I tested had a 14-inch LED touch screen, which was highly responsive to touch-enabled applications. In a clever nod to user choice, Lenovo created three distinct displays to support different lines of business. The fact that the 512GB hard drive is a solid-state model with no moving parts adds even more speed by eliminating disk-based read-write bottlenecks. Complex spreadsheets and presentations in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint and detailed diagrams in Adobe Photoshop opened quickly with no delays. I found no business application that the X1 couldn’t handle, given its Core i7 processor and 16 gigabytes of speedy SDRAM. The X1 also has a rapid charge feature that can partially fill up the battery very quickly, which is perfect if users only have a few minutes near an outlet. The entire case has been redesigned to be thinner and lighter than before, while the battery can supply up to 18 hours of power on a single charge. This year, the new X1 models deliver a lot more than just incremental changes. Lenovo’s Carbon line has always featured its best ultraportable offerings.
The new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon bridges that gap, providing plenty of both with technology rarely seen in ultraportable designs. Business users working from home or on the road must normally decide between power and portability when it comes to notebooks.