The 2016 iteration of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Ultrabook pitched up earlier this year, ready to do battle with any other business Ultrabook you care to name.
And its throwdown has proven very difficult to beat, as not only is it true to the Ultrabook specification at 16.5mm thick and weighing just 1.2kg, but it offers exactly kind of features the modern business person needs – 10-hour battery life, portability, performance and enough security options to effectively lock down that important business data.
The excellent performance comes from the fact that the X1 Carbon is powered by Intel’s Skylake mobile processors. Despite its almost unbelievable thinness, it manages to cram up to 16GB of RAM and a solid-state hard drive inside its chassis.
With no storage performance bottleneck to hold it back and plenty of RAM, the X1 Carbon absolutely flies through Windows and chews up even the most demanding of business applications.
The 1440p screen Lenovo went with delivers very good colour accuracy as it does 95% sRGB. If it’s true 100%+ AdobeRGB you’re looking for, you won’t find it here as the X1 only does 63% AdobeRGB, but overall the screen is sharp enough and its colours good enough that it’ll work just fine in semi-professional environments.
On the security side, the X1 has everything except a card reader. You’ll find a fingerprint scanner and a TPM 1.2 module along with a Kensington lock slot and the option to password-protect its hard drive, BIOS and boot sequence.
The only thing to keep an eye out for if you’re interested in making use of vPro as well is the CPU model – Lenovo only supports vPro on X1 Carbons sporting Intel’s Core i7-6300U and i7-6600U processors.
If you travel a lot for work and you’ve always hated the extra weight of a bulky business notebook, you’ll love the X1 Carbon. It’s fast, weighs next to nothing and is almost ridiculously thin, and only your IT department will love it more than you will thanks to its extensive corporate security options.
Lenovo’s keyboard is still magic
Lightweight but not underpowered
Very sharp display” negatives=”Display is not 100% AdobeRGB”][rating title=”Design” value=”5″ range=”5″]
[rating title=”Performance” value=”5″ range=”5″]
[rating title=”Display” value=”4″ range=”5″]
[rating title=”Overall” value=”5″ range=”5″][/review_summary]
