14 DAY TRIAL // After discontinuing its X300 ultra-portable line, Lenovo is trying to take another swing at the Apple MacBook Air with the 21.5 mm thick X1 that is powered by a Sandy Bridge processor and a new battery technology.
When compared to its Apple rival, the Lenovo X1 is a little over 4mm thicker, but it packs some impressive specifications for a laptop this size.
The most important performance boost should be provided by the Intel Core i5-2520M processor that is based on the Sandy Bridge architecture and features dual computing cores with Hyper-Threading support.
Clocked at 2.5GHz (up to 3.2GHz thanks to Turbo Boost), this should run circles around the 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo CPU that Apple offers in the MacBook Air, although battery life will most surely get a hit.
Speaking of battery life, Lenovo states that it has used a new technology for the X1 which promises significant improvements in stamina and charging speed.
According to Lenovo's claims, this can attain an 80% charge in just 30 minutes and the X1 is rated at 5 hours of use between charges.
Just as the MBA, the Lenovo X1 will use a sealed battery that can only be replaced by a trained technician either on-site or in the depot.
The rest of the notebook specs include a 160GB solid state disk, 8GB of RAM, an SDXC card reader and the X1 can also be configured with a fingerprint reader. Sadly, we don't know what type of video outputs will be available.
The LCD panel measures 13.3-inch in diagonal, has a resolution of 1366x768 pixels and is protected by a Gorilla Glass screen.
Lenovo has not yet made official the X1, but the notebook was already listed by a Swiss computer distributor and as well as in some documents released on the Lenovo channel distributors' site. (via AnandTech)
