<div>We first got to know Lenovo, many years ago, when the company bought over IBM’s notebook business. The legendary IBM ThinkPad wasn’t IBM any more. But over time, Lenovo didn’t interfere too much with the ThinkPad branding, keeping most of its signature features intact. Though die-hard fans may believe the current ThinkPads are not a patch on the old ones, they’re really still very sturdy machines. Even though there’s a Yoga version of the ThinkPad with the screen bending back all the way, it’s still not compromising the strength of the laptop at all.<br /><br />The newest version of the ThinkPad is the X250, a nice light laptop that bends the screen down flat though not all the way to meet the bottom of the keyboard. It’s so light that they call it an ultrabook. And yet it seems so durable that it’s aimed at the enterprise. It’s a 12.5-inch device and the way it’s put together just makes it seem the perfect size — not a problem to carry and yet not cramped and miniaturised, making the user struggle to see the text on the screen for long days at work, everyday.<br /><br />The look of the X250 is all ThinkPad, from the grey-black or charcoal colour to the distinctive logo and blinking light, to the keyboard and the famous red track-point which you use instead of a mouse. The keys on the keyboard seem shallow at first, but as you begin to use them you find they’re perfectly adequate and allow you to input text pretty fast. The touchscreen is not only bright and quite a pleasure to look at but also responsive. Sound is nice and deep, not tiny and cheap as on some smaller laptops. Should one want to watch video — and that’s becoming an increasingly important part of business these days — the experience will be good.<br /><br />The battery life is one of the stronger points on this laptop, meant to last the whole day at work without the user having to bother about carrying the adaptor along as he or she flits from place to place with this lightweight workhorse. The version I checked out was the Intel 5th Generation Core i7 processor with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk, running Windows 8.1. There are other configurations available and of course a lot of options in the ThinkPad series itself. The X250 with the mentioned configuration is Rs 1,18,000 – not cheap, but very well built. <br /><br />(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 18-05-2015)</div>
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Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.