14 DAY TRIAL // When it announced the ThinkPad X130e at the beginning of this month, Lenovo said that this rugged educational notebook will be available for individual purchase starting December 20, but it now looks like shipments have been delayed to February of 2012.
As engadget has found out, Lenovo blames this on the educator’s eagerness of getting the X130e into the hands of their students, as the initial stock was sent to notebook hungry school districts, leaving no more units for end-users.
The demand is in fact so great, that the outfit doesn’t expect to have enough of these rugged ThinkPad’s to deliver to individual buyers until February of 2012, which is a long way from now.
For those of you in need of a quick refresher, the ThinkPad X130e was built especially for the education market so Lenovo concentrated on making it tougher than ever before by including a rubber bumper that circles the chassis along with a thicker bezel shielded by 1.2mm of plastic.
On the inside, schools can chose to configure the 11.6-inch X130e with an Intel Core i3-2367M processor, as well as AMD Fusion E-300 and E-450 APUs paired with 2GB of RAM (upgradeable to 8GB), and a hard drive providing up to 500GB of storage.
The rest of the features list includes Bluetooth 3.0 connectivity, a 6-cell battery rated for 8.5 hours of battery life, three USB 2.0 sockets, HDMI, VGA, and Ethernet ports, as well as a 4-in-1 memory card reader.
Startup time is estimated at under 20 seconds thanks to Lenovo’s RapidBoot technology, and the company is also offering its education clients the option to customize the laptops by tweaking the BIOS or by going with a colored lid.
Starting price is set at $469 (roughly 350 EUR), and this will get you the AMD version of the notebook with the stock 2GB of system memory.
