Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet review

The display's surface provides enough drag to make onscreen writing feel natural, if not exactly like pen and paper. The ThinkPad X60 Tablet's stylus has a bit more heft than its predecessor's, and Lenovo also added a rubberised finish for comfortable gripping and a digital eraser on the top that works just like a pencil eraser. For working in laptop mode, the X60 Tablet includes the super-comfortable ThinkPad keyboard as well as a red TrackPoint pointing stick. Beneath the keyboard are three mouse buttons (the central one acts as a scroll button).

The port selection on the ThinkPad X60 Tablet is about average for an ultraportable system, including mini-FireWire, VGA and three USB 2.0 plugs (two side by side), plus headphone and microphone jacks. All that's missing is an S-Video port, as found on the HP Compaq tc4400. Networking options include modem, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi; 802.11n wireless and WWAN are available as upgrades.

A Type II PC Card slot reads ExpressCards via an adaptor, and there's a handy Secure Digital flash card reader, though not the multi-format flash card reader we're used to seeing on traditional laptops. We understand Lenovo's decision to save on size and weight by forgoing a built-in optical drive, but we do wish that an external drive was included in the ThinkPad X60 Tablet's price.

The rest of the specs are impressive for such a lightweight tablet, starting with a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo L2400 processor; 1GB of swift 667MHz RAM; an 80GB, 5,400rpm hard drive; and integrated Intel graphics.

Performance
In our performance benchmarks, the X60 Tablet wasn't quite as good at multitasking as ultraportable competitors such as the Asus S6F and the Dell Latitude D420, and it fell between the two systems on our Photoshop tests. But when it came to the processor-intensive iTunes encoding test, the ThinkPad X60 Tablet's slightly higher processor speed resulted in performance that was at least 10 per cent faster than that of the Asus and the Dell.

All of this adds up to an ultraportable tablet that feels and acts like a real laptop when it comes to typical productivity and maybe even some light number-crunching.

We are still testing the battery life on the ThinkPad X60 Tablet -- check back to this page for the full report later this week.

Edited by Matthew Elliott
Additional editing by Kate Macefield