Lenovo ThinkPad X230t Pro Reviews

The Lenovo ThinkPad X230t plucks the best features from business ultraportables and adds multitouch and quality convertible tablet design.

If you're a devotee of slim and svelte, the ungainly battery protrusion at the back of the tablet will make you shudder, but the 63-watt-hour battery helped the ThinkPad X230 Tablet last a competitive seven and a half hours in our MobileMark 2007 rundown test, a little longer than the Sony ultrabook, though about an hour less than the Toshiba Portege. (The HP ProBook 6360b was unable to complete the MobileMark test, so its time reflects a video rundown, looping an MP4 movie at 50 percent screen brightness.) On the storage side, the ThinkPad has a number of options, from our test unit's rather skimpy 320GB hard drive to a 500GB drive (only $10 more) or a 128GB or 180GB solid-state drive. Upgrading our system's standard 4GB of RAM to 8GB would cost $160. (Jumping to 16GB would cost $1,060.) As a stand-alone notebook, the X230T is an attractive, if slightly portly, package. As a tablet, though, it exposes the limitations of Windows 7 as a touch-oriented operating system. That will change with the arrival of Windows 8, which is built for touch.