The newest addition to the ThinkPad X series incorporates the best of the MacBook Air (13.3-inch screen, full keyboard, thickness of less than one inch) with the best of the Portege R500 (solid-state drive, a thorough selected ports), while adding its own characteristics, such as a DVD burner, WWAN Connectivity and GPS.

The X300 ThinkPad DNA is evident in its instantly recognizable black, square-edged case, but at 0.73 inch thick and weighs anywhere 1.33 to 1.59 kg (depending on your choice of the battery and optical drive) it’s just the most streamlined ThinkPad yet.

The biggest criticism of the ThinkPad X300 is its price: the cost of the basic configuration of the AU $ 3,999 and goes up from there. But the components of innovative design, offers a thorough and sophisticated are not cheap, and the ThinkPad X300 is truly unique in its balance between portability and usability.

Apart from the size of the laptop, the design changes with the ThinkPad X300 is incremental. The ultraportable still features a rectangular black box built around a magnesium chassis. There is still a blue ThinkVantage button above the keyboard, a fingerprint reader below it, and a keyboard light on the top edge of the screen.

ThinkPad fans will still notice small changes to make the X300 a bit more attractive. The lid and wrist rest feature a soft matte finish conversation, the ThinkVantage, power and mute buttons glow when pressed, and the front without any ports or switches.

In addition to the keyboard light, the X300′s display bezel includes a 1.3 megapixel webcam and a noise-canceling microphone for digital web conferences. The matte finish screen behaves a resolution of 1440 x 900 native who is thinner than the MacBook Air and other similar size screens in the text and icons that are a bit smaller than you might expect.

The sharper resolution does not lead to major problems, even if we can pump up the font on the website of a newspaper, so we have a long article to read. We also zoomed in a bit when working on documents and spreadsheets. The compromise: the more actual screen real estate for multitasking and, when it is time for a break, great videos.

Given the size of typing the typical executive does throughout the workday, a keyboard, can make or break an ultraportable. The ThinkPad X300 uses basically the same keyboard on Lenovo’s 14 and 15-inch models – ie, not the condensed keyboard on previous X series models and many ultraportable laptops from other manufacturers. After conducting an entire morning of work – and writing this review – on the ThinkPad X300, we still do not feel we were typing on a laptop. We love it.

Lenovo has decided both the red TrackPoint eraser-head pointing and stick a touchpad on the ThinkPad X300. The decision is understandable: many ThinkPad users are viscerally attached to their track points, while other users can not stand it, so why not both ways? However, the double sets of mouse buttons seem to go against the general theme of simplification that the ThinkPad X300 embodies. To make room for the TrackPoint buttons, the touchpad is placed rather low on the wrist, the buttons on the edge phones.

Fortunately, the ThinkPad X300 is thin enough that the path we use with our wrist resting on a work surface – or on our leg, when the laptop in our lap. More worrying is the fact that during our lazy typing moments when our wrists dropped to the wrist, we were likely to graze the touch pad and accidentally lose your cursor.

The X300 is an interesting exercise in minimalism. The laptop does not have features that would be considered standard on an ultraportable, such as an expansion card or multiformat memory card reader, both of which are available on the Toshiba Portégé R500. But he adds features that are likely of greater value to mobile workers, such as WWAN, wireless USB, and even GPS.

So it is equipped with many features that the MacBook Air does not, including more than two USB ports, an Ethernet connection and a DVD burner. These additions make the ThinkPad X300 a realistic choice for use as main computer, which is a big advantage over its rival Apple, especially considering the price.

The basic model of the ThinkPad X300 costs $ 3,999 for a large. Many of these prices can be attributed to the laptop of 64GB solid state drive, which is faster application launch and boot times and promises a life of a traditional hard drive with moving parts. (Unlike the MacBook Air, which comes in one configuration at low cost with a traditional hard disk mill, the X300 is only available with a solid-state disk.)

Our review unit included a few updates – WWAN, GPS, and a long battery life to six cells.

Like the MacBook Air, the ThinkPad X300 includes new small-Form-Factor Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, but with a slightly slower clock speed. That slower speed is at least partly responsible for the ThinkPad X300 MacBook Air drag on the multimedia multitasking portion of CNET Labs’ performance criteria.

Fortunately the ThinkPad’s 2GB of RAM helped him with the MacBook Air on our Photoshop test, where they are good results from the Toshiba Portégé R500. As with any Core 2 Duo processor, the ThinkPad X300 was more than enough for typical productivity tasks, including web browsing, media playback and office applications run. We were able to complete the morning, whereas the distribution of music over the wireless link, without performance issues, stuttering or noticeable.

In anecdotal testing of the ThinkPad X300 with the six-cell battery, we were able to between 3 and 4 hours of battery life depending on our usage and screen brightness settings. CNET Labs tests DVD Battery consumption, the ThinkPad X300 is dead after 3 hours, 43 minutes, just 20 minutes before the MacBook Air. This is obviously not enough juice for a full day of work outside the office, but it’s almost an hour longer than the battery life of the Portégé R500 is.

Here is another place where the ThinkPad X300 integrated DVD is an advantage: you can purchase an additional battery of three cells that correspond to the internal drive bay to buy time to extend your mobile computing. Also an advantage: the ThinkPad X300 removable battery, which is remarkable if only because users can not the battery in the MacBook Air to replace.

As Lenovo has moved to integrated control systems, the company has had the basic ThinkPad warranty to one year. Extension of coverage to three years costs $ 152.90 AU, other updates at a reasonable cost to add coverage for a fall or spills and LCD damage. The preloaded ThinkVantage Application Suite helps users solve problems, and Lenovo support site for troubleshooting includes the expected topics, driver downloads and manuals.

The good

* Extremely thin and light
* ThinkPad simplified yet
* Built-in DVD burner
* WWAN, GPS and wireless USB

Poor

* Solid-state drive comes at a high premium
* Location touchpad is easy to accidentally graze while typing