First Look: Lenovo ThinkPad T400s

Think back to when you saw your first Bruce Lee movie (there’s good money it was Enter The Dragon). Do you remember how Lee’s slender build concealed densely-packed muscle which the champion martial artist could almost instantly activate, transforming his slight and compact frame into whipcords of sinew?

That’s pretty much the same story as Lenovo’s just-released ThinkPad T400s, only without those lethal kicks and all that shrieking.
The T400s (available now, with pricing starting at $2,899) may have the same slim profile and light weight as one of the latest ‘thin and light’ laptops running on Intel’s ultra-low voltage (ULV) silicon, but it packs a full-blown Intel Core 2 Duo powerplant clocking at 2.4 or 2.53GHz.

This helps the T400s punch well above its weight and outperform ULV notebooks built around processors which are largely single core and top out at 1.4GHz.

As a result the T400s should be able to handle almost every task you throw at it, except for heavily graphics-intensive chores where the integrated Intel X4500 graphics will choke. There’s no option for discrete graphics, this being one of the sacrifices to help the T400s attain its svelte profile.
There are few other concessions, with Lenovo throwing plenty of high-tech tricks into the bag. Many of these are borrowed from the ThinkPad X300 series, such as a ‘roll cage’ built from light yet strong monocoque carbon reinforced fibre around the display and a magnesium alloy frame surrounding the main chassis. The designers even wedged in a wafer-thin 9.5mm optical drive, available as a DVD burner or Blu-Ray player.

But with every swing comes a roundabout, and in this case it’s battery life. Don’t expect the eight-plus hours you get from the likes of the Acer Timeline: full-voltage chips have a thirst to match.

Lenovo rates the T400s as being good for up to 5.5 hours on the flat six-cell 45Whr battery, but this is almost certainly running under Lenovo’s Maximum Battery Life mode with all the options in Battery Stretch panel activated.

That renders the notebook almost unusable – for instance, screen brightness is wound back to zero, making the display pretty much unreadable.

Put to the BatteryEater test with full bore power but no wireless, the T400s nosedived in just under two hours. Hammering out this review and using Wi-Fi got us to 3.5 hours, during which the T400s ran whisper-quiet with no signs of excessive heat from its underbelly.

You could expect 4.5 hours under everyday usage with more aggressive power management settings. Just don’t expect to be able to leave the AC adaptor at home – not unless you stump for the optional three-cell Ultra Bay battery which replaces the optical drive to deliver a claimed three hours.

From our experience we’d suggest that two-battery combo would get you close to all-day battery life but travelling sans power brick would still be a risky proposition.

There are plenty of signs that the T400s is a ‘serious’ laptop for the mobile professional rather than the home-and-café consumer set (that is, if the ThinkPad brand and buttoned-down black design didn’t already tip you off).

Some are about style, such as Lenovo’s loyalty to the traditional thick bezel around the screen instead of the ‘more trendy than Fendi’ edge-to-edge glass panel.

Other touches are undeniably sensible, such as the use of a matte-coated display rather than glossy and highly reflective glass – a material which looks great in the showroom but is terrible for actually working on, especially outdoors or even in areas of high ambient light.

Lenovo is also betting on VoIP as an increasingly important part of the mobile computing mix. The integrated Webcam has been upgraded from the common 1.3 megapixel sensor to 2 megapixels, so as to capture higher quality images even in low light conditions. There are twin digital microphones for better pickup, a new hotkey combo (Fn+F6) to launch your VoIP software plus a welcome microphone mute button.

The 400s also showcases some smart touches which we hope will be rolled out into future members of the family. The often-used Escape and Delete keys are double-sized, being twice as tall as their siblings.

The enlarged trackpad now sits flush with the palmrest rather than stand proud above it, and sports a dimpled finish for better traction.


That said, we found the texture worked fine for long sweeping movements but was less effective for nipping across shorting distances on the screen. It also supports Apple-esque multitouch gestures which you’ll either love or hate.

The keyboard remains the best in the business – Lenovo long ago aced the art and science of great keyboard design. Even so, perhaps Lenovo will one day progress from that handy little keyboard light (activated by stabbing Fn+F10) to a fully underlit keypad.

A physical toggle switch increases or decreases the volume through the gutsy top-firing speakers. Build quality is still fantastic, with nary a hint of chassis flex around the chassis or under the keyboard. And the overall design is subtle cleaner, less busy and more refined.

Of the three USB ports, one is a combo USB/eSATA jack while another provides always-on power to recharge USB devices such as an iPod.

But we’re unconvinced that the physical layout is optimal – only one USB port sits on the side panel, and that’s the bare bones no-added-frills USB port rather than the USB+power port which would be far more handy for connecting temporary devices such as an iPod.


Both the USB+power and USB+eSATA ports live at the rear where they’re much harder to get to. The T400s can also drive two external displays – one through the VGA port and a second via the standard-size DisplayPort socket.

Options for ordering your laptop à la carte include the choice between a solid state drive of up to 256GB and a 250GB hard drive; an ExpressCard/34 slot or multi-format memory card reader; and inbuilt 3G, with Vodafone as the nominated carrier.