Terrific screen, stylish design, ruggedish casing, fingerprint
security

Odd keyboard layout, not cheap

The third incarnation of Lenovo’s X1 Carbon comes with an improved HD+ screen and a few new innovations, including an adaptive keyboard that changes depending on which app you’re using.

But it might have been even better if that was the only change they’d made to the keyboard.

Chassis and screen

The new version follows the tried and tested Lenovo Ultrabook styling, with a sleek carbon fibre casing that tapers from 20mm to an extremely svelte 14mm. It certainly feels tough enough for standard duties and it’s extremely lightweight too at just 1.27kg — Lenovo claims it’s the lightest 14-inch Ultrabook available.

Like the previous incarnation, the screen tilts through 180 degrees, so you’ll always be able to find the right angle.

The 14-inch touch screen delivers a pixel count of 2560×1440 — way beyond plain old 1080p full HD — and it looks stunning. Plenty of detail of course, but the colours are vivid without being saturated and the contrast levels are high. Viewing angles are pretty good too, which is handy for showing it off.

The screen is good but the keyboard is more of a curate’s egg.

First the good bit. Instead of the traditional row of function keys at the top, Lenovo has included an adaptive LCD strip, which displays different backlit functions depending on which app you’re using, with four different types. So when you move from the home version to launch your browser you get buttons like page-back, refresh and new tab. When you’re using a media player you’ll see volume, display brightness, search, cloud storage, gesture control, and voice recognition. And for video calls with Skype and other apps you’ll get microphone and camera settings.

The keys feel deep, even quite luxurious for an Ultrabook, but a couple of them have been mysteriously moved around or removed altogether. The backspace key for instance is a small one placed at top right next to the delete key. Since most of us touch typists expect backspace to be a larger button beneath delete, this is likely to lead to some confusion while our muscle memory learns the new regime. The caps lock key has also been replaced by two small home and end keys. You can get caps lock by double tapping the shift key but it’s still very odd, and a pain in the digits.

Processor and performance

The 4th gen Intel Core i5-4200U processor held up pretty well considering it’s got that powerful screen to run, though that wasn’t necessarily reflected in our benchmark tests. It delivered a PC Mark score of 2214, which isn’t exceptional. Conversion of our ten-minute test film took 4 mins 25 secs, which is a little on the slow side and while playing Portal, it delivered rather poor frame rates of 75fps. Stats aren’t everything of course and in use it generally felt nippy enough — it’ll certainly deliver all you’d expect from general use.

The battery lasted pretty well but wasn’t exceptional. We got five and a half hours of constant use from it on test, which puts it behind the long-lived likes of the Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus.

Conclusion

The latest Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon is a pricey Ultrabook – no question. For your money you get an incredibly sharp screen and a tough, lightweight case, plus a few additional bells and whistles like the adaptive keyboard. But you also get a frustratingly obtuse keyboard design and a less than exceptional processor. It’s certainly worth a look, but you’ll need deep pockets and an open mind.

Software: Windows 8.1 Pro 64

Processor: 4th Generation Intel Core i5-4200U
Processor( 1.60GHz 1600MHz 3MB)

Memory: 8GB RAM

Display: 14in QHD 2560×1440

Hard Drive: 180GB SSD

Graphics: Intel HD 4400

Webcam: 1.3 megapixel 720p HD

Wireless: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth

Ports: 2x USB 3.0, headphone/microphone jack,
HDMI, Mini DisplayPort, Ethernet ext port, power connector

Blu-ray player: No

Size: 331x227x14-20mm

This article was originally published by WIRED UK