Taking the tablet
In one major departure to previous Lenovo tablets, the screen rotates only clockwise. This is not a Thinkpad you want to pick up by the lid with one hand, although most of the time, it will do so without the base unit swivelling away. A pressure-sensitive, sensor-packed Wacom-style tablet stylus is included, that slots in the right-hand side of the machine. The touch display worked well, but may be disconcerting to those of you familiar with cruder resistive screens and more modern capacitive touch screens.
The screen allows touch or stylus use
Like the new consumer fondleslabs, the screen can be enabled to be finger sensitive – it’s off by default - but obviously, the Windows UI is optimized for finer input, that calls for a pen or mouse. I found a bug where enabling the screen disabled the machine's TouchPad and TrackPoint input. It was hardly an inducement to use the machine as a convertible.
The X220T can be ordered with optional Gorilla glass; Lenovo also includes its SimpleTap overlay intended to give one touch access to features such as sleep, volume mute and toggling the radios.
In tests with PCMark Vantage, the X220T notched up 4338 PCMarks which is significantly under par with other Core i7 machines Reg Hardware has tested. No doubt the absence of a separate grsphics card makes an impact here and if the X220T had been supplied with the optional 160GB SSD, this result would have been improved still further.
The iconic Trackpoint as it's officially called, adds a tactile treat to this fondleslab
As for 3D gamers, you can go whistle, the Thinkpad X-series has never been for you, given that Lenovo relies on Intel’s integrated graphics to shift the pixels. With the six-cell battery, I found the machine cruised through six hours of constant use, with WiFi turned on and the screen set to around 2/3 of its maximum brightness. Achieving over seven hours was possibly simply by judicious use of the WiFi.
Next page: Weighty consequences
COMMENTS
Wide screen on a business laptop = fail
Have to agree with all the comments around this annoying obsession with wide screen 16:9 ratios.
It is pretty much useless on a business machine, and probably about 95% useless on a laptop for home use.
I've got a T400 at work, and that's the older 1280 x 800 size. At 800, this screen is only just high enough for most uses, but forces you to scroll up and down all the time when using normal apps, such as writing or reviewing documents in Word etc. Most of the width is wasted, as almost all apps don't utilise this extra screen estate. So this new 1366x768 size is actually making things worse! Taking away the hight, when you really need more, and adding to the width, when you really need less of this!
The only use I can see for having a 19:9 ratio, is for watching movies, and I'll never do that at work, and have only ever done that once away from work.
So that basically means, at least for me, all current laptops with a 16:9 ratio screen, are unsuitable for purpose for about 99.99% of the time.
Bring back 4:3 for business use, or at least give people the option. Even 16:10 is better, as at least there you don't loose all the hight!
Wide screen on a business laptop = fail * 2
Lenovo, stop copying everyone else. I want a 4:3 screen. This is a machine to work on, not play movies!
I'm still using the Thinkpad R52 which I've had more years than I care to remember because it has a 4:3 screen which is 1400x1050 pixels, and still only 15". Incidentally I bought it myself, with my own money to replace the Thinkpad A30 which I had also bought with my own money, but unfortunately stood on after many years of reliable service :'(
The only way I can get that kind of vertical resolution on a laptop these days is to buy something which is 1920x1080, and the size of a f*cking aircraft carrier's flight deck.
Please please please be a little different, stop being a sheep, and give me a good upgrade path, because at the moment I'm seriously looking at bi-passing the sata/pata bridge chip you put in this machine so I can install a sata SSD to get some more speed out of it and run it for another 5 years!
Screen Ratio
When was 1280 x 800 4:3?
Surely the shift is 16:10 to 16:9 for the resolutions quoted.
Exactly
I'm on my 4th Thinkpad X series laptop at the moment: all bought second-hand with my own money, run for a few years with Debian and then sold on still with more life left in them. I won't buy anything else.
Aside: nice to see Orlowski not trolling!
1366x768
The preponderance of 1366x768 laptops is disappointing....to think that the vertical resolution of most small-ish laptops today is *exactly* the same as it was in the 1990s when 1024x768 was the norm! And what's the point of a 16:9 laptop anyway? Is watching DVDs the only thing people use laptops for?
