Lenovo Aims Bigger Guns at Apple - Announces X301

Earlier this year, Lenovo had the courage and technical expertise to unveil a fully-fledged notebook that could rival Apple's highly mediated MacBook Air. Known as the ThinkPad X300, the new device provided an impressive performance in a lightweight form factor, at under three pounds. Due to the release of Intel's Montevina platform, the Centrino 2, Lenovo's X300 notebook, is about to receive an upgrade, which the company will roll out in the form of a new notebook dubbed X301.

Despite the fact that the upgrade comes a bit later than the change on the rest of the ThinkPad models, including the smaller X200, it is rather impressive, especially considering the design and overall weight of X301. Aside from the design features, which are similar to the company's X300 model, the upcoming notebook will be equipped with a new Core 2 Duo processor that will boost its performance by up to 20 percent.

The range of Core 2 processors that will be featured in Lenovo's upcoming notebooks extends from the low power U9300 at 1.2GHz to the U9400 at 1.4GHz. In addition, due to the support from the Centrino 2 platform, the X301 will move to DDR3 memory and will be equipped with either a 128GB (that will be available a couple of weeks after the initial release) or a 64GB SSD.

The X301 will also feature a DisplayPort support, an ultra thin optical drive and a number of connectivity options including 802.11n WiFi, WWAN, Bluetooth, GPS and even WiMAX, which will be made available later this year.

Regarding pricing and availability, the new X301 should be available on August 26th with a price tag that will start at a whooping $2599.

It will be interesting to see whether Apple will adopt the Centrino 2 platform for its MacBook Air, thus improving the performance of the notebook.