Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Steiner editor at CNET and you going back to school do you want a laptop well by a ThinkPad that's the idea that lenovo was trying to sell on the lenovo thinkpad x1 30 ii and obviously we're a long way from back-to-school season but this educational targeted laptop is supposedly targeted at the K through 12 set now of course it's also being sold to some extent as a portable ThinkPad last year the lenovo thinkpad x1 20 ii was one of my favorite little small laptops that i looked at that had an AMD fusion III 50 processor inside so as faster than a netbook but a little more sluggish than a full-fledged laptop and that was the compromise they had to face with these 11 inch laptops now a year later this is an AMD II 300 processor which performs about the same but this laptop costs 549 that still feels too high for what you're getting in here and it is very sturdily built and that's the big move here that's educationally targeted at least this laptop slit has changed it's thicker but it also has curved rubberized bumpers that also protect the rest of the laptop and provide some dust resistance this also as a sturdier hinge so if you want to throw into a backpack and give it some stress testing this does feel like a very thick sturdy laptop but it is also half a pound heavier than the x1 20 e 3.9 pounds that's not far off from a regular full-fledged laptop weight and you can feel it this thing is thick it's over an inch thick so if you're comparing it to an ultrabook or a MacBook Air forget it the other problem is that there are laptops that have equivalent processing specs you can get for Less the HP dm1 z one of our favorite 11 inch laptops has sold for around 399 as of last year and so you can get one of those types of deals for a similar amount of money now is an educational friendly well I don't really know if this is education friendly because while it does have customizable back lids for bulk purchases and it does have a a nice sturdy feel it's a Windows 7 laptop there are a lot of those and some of the design elements I don't really like when I think about a kid using them for instance there is a track point here I mean that's a think pad stay but when a seventh-grader want to use one of those the problem is not that it sits in the honking middle of the keyboard but the fact that it's discrete buttons take up a tremendous amount of the real estate that otherwise it'd be used for that multi-touch click pad beneath it's just an awkward touch that suggests that this laptops kind of hedging its bets oh yes I want to be an educational laptop I also want to be for small businesses and that's the biggest problem I have of this laptop it feels like an in-betweener and the price doesn't really feel right you should be game typing something around four hundred dollars for a laptop like this as opposed to 550 but it does have good battery life and you know if you want something that feels somewhat indestructible for a student maybe take a look at it but there's really nothing special going on in this laptop that you haven't seen before I'm Scott Stein and as a look at the Lenovo ThinkPad x1 30 II