Lenovo ThinkPad X200 Tablet (Multitouch) ~ MY BLOG

Not only does this convertible have an excellent touchscreen, but its performance and battery life are stellar.

We’ve long been fans of Lenovo’s ThinkPad X200 Series of exceptional ultraportables, having given high marks to the original X200, the low-voltage X200s, and the X200 Tablet. Now, more than a year after introducing the original X200 Tablet, Lenovo has added an optional multitouch screen that takes an already best-in-class business convertible to the next level by offering very good Windows 7 performance and seven hours of battery life.

Design

The first thing you’ll notice about the X200 Tablet is its small size and light weight. At 11.6 x 10.1 x 1.3 inches, the notebook is a little bigger than the 12-inch Dell Latitude XT2 (11.7 x 8.7 x 1.1 inches). According to Lenovo, the X200 Tablet (with a four-cell battery) weighs a netbook-like 3.5 pounds, but our review unit came with the eight-cell option (which protrudes out the back) and weighs in at 4.2 pounds. The X200 Tablet is nearly half a pound heavier than the Latitude XT2, but that system has a smaller six-cell battery.

Like all other ThinkPads, the X200 Tablet features a matte black chassis, green indicator lights, and a bright red trackpoint. Above the keyboard are keys for raising, lowering, and muting audio, and the familiar ThinkVantage button, which launches Lenovo utilities for managing power, wireless, and other settings. Below the lower edge of the screen are a finger print reader, a switch for locking the operating system, a power button, and buttons for rotating the display, hitting Ctrl + Alt + Delete, and pulling up the ThinkVantage tools menu.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The X200 Tablet sports a full-size, spill-resistant keyboard, which has the comfortable, tried-and-true ThinkPad design. The keys offer fantastic tactile feedback, and we were able to achieve a strong 80 words per minute and 2 percent error rate in Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor. However, those with larger hands may find the short wrist rest to be a minor discomfort.

As with the ThinkPad X200, Lenovo eschews its usual trackpoint-and-touchpad combination in favor of only a trackpoint to streamline the system. That may seem like an odd choice to some, but veteran ThinkPad users and novices should have no problems navigating the 12.1-inch display with just the stick.

Display and Touchscreen Performance

The X200 Tablet’s 1280 x 800-pixel resolution screen can swivel either right or left to convert into tablet mode, which is particularly helpful for lefties. The screen is incredibly bright, and viewing angles are strong even from 90 degrees to the left or right.

The screen recognizes both finger and stylus input. After some calibrating and increasing the sensitivity settings, we were impressed with the quality and responsiveness of the touch experience; using the stylus, we were able to easily navigate through the Start menu, tap on icons, and drag windows around.

Even better, we were able to use Window 7’s built-in handwriting recognition tool, which automatically appears as a floating widget above your apps, to write text into Microsoft Word 2007 by hand. We were simply amazed at how accurate the program was (in light of our terrible handwriting). The X200 Tablet even got a little more accurate as we used it, since it is supposed to learn from user input. Even when the system mistook our chicken scratch, we were able to easily highlight a word and replace the incorrect letter with the right one.

The new multitouch screen, a $200 option, uses a high-quality capacitive touch digitizer to register input from two fingers at once, allowing users to perform such multitouch gestures as pinching to zoom or swiping two fingers to scroll. In testing, the screen was highly responsive, and only a light touch was required for it to register. However, we had to be careful to use the pads at the end of our fingers, as the screen did not always recognize presses with our nails.

Using the tips of our fingers, we were able to take advantage of Windows 7’s built-in touch features, including opening Jump Lists by swiping upward on taskbar icons, scrolling in Internet Explorer by swiping up or down, rotating pictures by turning our fingers, and zooming in/out on images and Web pages by pinching.

While we wish that Microsoft or Lenovo had done something to make the Start menu shortcuts or system widgets like the window-close button get bigger when you use your finger, we found it easier to target icons and buttons on the X200 Tablet’s 1280 x 800-pixel screen than on the T400s’ higher resolution 1440 x 900 screen.

Of course, any Windows 7 application, even those written with no touch support, can accept touches in lieu of mouse gestures. For example, we were able to navigate around a spreadsheet in Excel 2007 using touch, even though the individual cells were hard to target. Windows Paint is one application that works very well with multitouch, as it allows you to draw with several fingers at once. However, the X200 Tablet limits you to two fingers, while the T400s allows for more than four.

In addition to the built-in handwriting recognition application for stylus users, Windows 7 provides a touchscreen keyboard you can use to type on the screen. This comes in particularly handy when the system is in portrait mode and the physical keyboard and trackpoint are unavailable.