Lenovo chases MacBook Air with ThinkPad X200

Lenovo’s trio of 12.1 inch ThinkPads has reached our shores, following their first showing at Intel’s Centrino 2 launch earlier this year. These smaller siblings of the 13.3 inch ThinkPad X300 have all ditched the optical drive in their pursuit of a trim profile, light weight and extended battery life.

The cornerstone of the range is the ThinkPad X200, which includes the option to swap the 250GB hard drive for a 64GB solid state drive for $869 on top of the $2,999 list price. However, that’s for the corporate model running Windows Vista Business and Centrino Pro silicon – a more dressed-down consumer model with Vista Home Basic and plain vanilla Centrino is currently slashed from $2,599 to $1,949.

But it’s the X200s variant that’ll being the most sizzle to the mobility stakes. Inside this 20mm thin and 1kg light chassis, which is reinforced by a magnesium alloy frame and carbon and glass fibre roll cage around the screen, Lenovo has opted for Intel’s pint-sized SL9400 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo mobile processor.

This is one of three ‘small package’ powerplants based on the 45nm Penryn architecture, and it’s possibly the same engine which Apple will drop into an upgraded second-gen MacBook Air later this week. The current MacBook Air uses a similarly downsized processor belonging to the 65nm Merom class, whereas the newer silicon is expected to boost both performance and battery life.

Lenovo claims that the X200s can deliver up to 13 hours of battery life under MobileMark 2007 testing when fitted with the 64GB SSD and nine cell battery, although that adds $1,048 to the standard $3,229 sticker, leaving your waller much thinner than the X200.

Rounding out the ThinkPad Three is a touch-screen Tablet version of the X200 from $3,499. This is equipped with a screen which swivels from both directions rather than a fixed clockwise movement plus dual-array digital microphones  for better VoIP pickup and conference calls.