New ThinkPad X200 mimics MacBook Air

Lenovo scored plenty of points with the PC crowd in March this year when it unveilled the ThinkPad X300, a 13.3in notebook that drew favourable feature comparisons to the MacBook Air.

The X300 had a CD/DVD drive, three USB ports, an Ethernet port and integrated 3G HSDPA. The three-cell battery was not only removable, but could be swapped out for a four-cell battery to boost the time between refills to just over six hours, a figure that could be extended to nine hours if you replaced the optical drive with an optional ‘media bay’ battery.

Now Lenovo has taken a page from Apple’s own playbook and released an even more Air-like ThinkPad. The 12.1in X200, which made its worldwide debut at today’s Centrino 2 launch in San Francisco, sheds the optical drive to attain a bantamweight 1.34kg including the four-cell battery. Also in common with the Air, and unlike the X300, you can choose between a 64GB solid state drive and a hard drive of up to 320GB.

Even with those shared traits, Lenovo still delights in striding a few steps ahead of the Air. The optional lightweight optical drive plays Blu-ray discs, and customers can also plumb for a whopping nine-cell battery that’s good to chug along for up to nine hours.

Sandwiched between the magnesium alloy top and bottom covers is Intel’s new Centrino 2-class Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz) or P8600 (2.4GHz) processor with 3MB of L2 cache.

In addition to the trio of USB ports and Gigabit Ethernet there’s an ExpressCard slot and memory card reader, while it’s likely the Australian edition will sport inbuilt HSDPA 3.6. Also on the tick-a-box roster of options is a GPS module

However, the profile isn’t as slim as you may expect: the X200 still nudges 2.1cm, which actually makes it slightly fatter than the X300. And the dictates of the 12.1in notebook’s smaller footprint meant the touchpad had to be deep-sixed, with the familiar red trackpoint stick as the sole means of mouse movement.