14 DAY TRIAL // Announced in December 2011, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X130e educational notebook has now become available for pre-order from the company’s website with shipments being expected to begin on February 10.
Since the X130e is built especially for education, Lenovo concentrated on making its new ThinkPad tougher than ever before. For that, it started by including a rubber bumper that circles the chassis along with a thicker bezel shielded by 1.2mm of plastic.
But this is only the start of the list, as Lenovo has also added recessed and reinforced ports, stronger hinges as well as an accelerometer to protect the hard drive.
Moving to the inside, schools can chose to configure the 11.6-inch ThinkPad X130e laptop 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.
Other features include 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 schools the option to customize the notebooks by tweaking the BIOS or by going with a colored lid.
Currently, Lenovo is making available for pre-order the X130e in two base configurations, one sporting an AMD E-300 APU, while the other comes equipped with Intel’s 1.4GHz Core i3-2367M processor.
A 250GB hard drive and 4GB of system memory round up the specs list of the two machines, the former coming with a $429 (327 EUR) price tag, while the faster Intel-powered ThinkpPad X130e is listed by Lenovo at $549 (419 EUR).