Lenovo ThinkPad T400s Touch

Multi-touch functionality is one of the newest features being added to notebooks and tablets alike. Currently only tablets offer screen manipulation of objects, whereas notebooks get limited multi-touch through touchpads. Lenovo is hoping to change this, by adding screen multi-touch capabilities to the thin and light Lenovo ThinkPad T400s. For an additional $400 over the base T400s, users get a touchscreen panel, albeit a non-pivoting one. In this review we take a look at the new T400s Touch with Windows 7, and see if we actually find an increase in our productivity.

Our Lenovo ThinkPad T400s Touch specifications:

Windows 7 Professional
1440 x 900 WXGA+ with MultiTouch LED Backlit (Matte finish)
Intel Core 2 Duo SP9600 (2.53GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 6MB Cache)
4GB DDR3 RAM (2GB x 2)
128GB Toshiba SSD
DVD+/-RW
Intel 5100AGN, Bluetooth 2.0
Intel X4500M Integrated
Built-in web camera
6-cell 11.1v 44Wh
Dimensions: (LxWxH) 13.27 x 9.49 x 0.83"
Weight: 4lbs 6.9oz
Retail Price: $1,999 Starting

Build and Design

The new ThinkPad T400s looks completely revamped and polished compared to the regular T400. The chassis has slimmed down significantly, and the weight of the notebook has also dropped by almost a pound. The exterior is still wrapped in Lenovo's much-loved rubberized black paint, but the design just looks cleaner and less busy than previous ThinkPad models.

Looking inside, the main changes start to become obvious. Besides the new keyboard and touchpad that we will go over shortly, Lenovo changed the shape of the palmrest around the touchpad, with the touchpad resting flush with the palmrest instead of being slightly recessed. The screen bezel is smooth all around the perimeter of the display, unlike the T400 which shows rough plastic grids near the built-in antennas and cutouts near the light and webcam. Even when compared to the ThinkPad X301, the new T400s looks more refined. The speaker grills are larger and look better suited to the design. Even the fingerprint reader manages to blend in better, with an all-black design instead of gold and silver like past models.

Build quality is still fantastic, with barely a hint of chassis flex even as it has decreased in thickness. The screen has some minor side-to-side flex when open, but no more than previous models. Protection for the screen, even with the super thin cover is surprisingly good, showing only small amounts of screen distortion when you are squeezing the back of the display. The new chassis feels quite rugged.

With the thinner design Lenovo completely reworked the chassis for the T400s, and it looks completely different than the T400 once you start opening it up. The hard drive is now accessed through a panel under the left side of the palmrest, which is now 1.8" instead of the 2.5" found in the T400. System memory and wireless cards are found under a single access panel on the bottom of the notebook. Compared to removing the palmrest on previous models, you now just loosen one screw and pop off a single panel to upgrade memory. With most of the slots changing location to the underside of the notebook, removing the keyboard is now only required to replace a broken one, or to get access to a half-sized mini-PCIe slot used for Wireless USB on some models. I really hope future ThinkPads follow a similar design to the T400s, since it is so much easier to upgrade components now.

Screen and Speakers

The T400s Touch uses a similar panel as the regular T400s, but with a touch surface added to the display. Everest indicates the panel part number as a Samsung made LT141DEQ8B00, with an N-Trig multitouch device. Just like the regular T400s, the screen has a WGXA+ resolution and is LED-backlit. Overall the screen looks nearly identical, but with one downside that is shared with nearly all touchscreens. Touch panels appear to have a hazy layer over the screen, although on the T400s it is not as apparent. Users who have never seen a notebook and tablet side-by-side might not notice this difference, but if you are coming from a regular notebook you may be slightly annoyed. Color and contrast are good compared to business notebooks, but it might seem washed out next to the latest and greatest glossy consumer-notebook display. Backlight levels are strong, with my preferred setting being 50-60% at my home and about 75% at the office that has brighter overhead lighting. Backlight bleed is minimal, only barely coming through at the highest brightness levels.

The touch surface is a unique feature for a notebook. On one hand you can directly manipulate objects without a mouse or touchpad, but on the other you have a fixed screen that can't rotate like a tablet. Another inherent flaw of multitouch is that since it uses your finger as the pointer, it will never be as precise or accurate as a pen-input touch surface. This means that the controls are crude at best, using gesture or tap-based commands. In this area the multitouch screen works great. Scrolling around websites is easy with one finger, although sometimes the screen detects two inputs and starts to zoom the page. While drawing circles, we noticed some issues with our preproduction screen, where certain parts of the panel would get jittery, instead of showing smooth lines. As our model has a very early panel in it, it would be safe to say production models wouldn't have this problem.

Lenovo included new software to take advantage of the multi-touch features, with the primary one being Simple Tap. This application gives the user direct access to basic system features like volume and camera controls, wireless devices, and screen brightness. Each control is given its own tile, and you can add application shortcuts to the list if you want. Simply tapping the screen with two fingers brings up the tiles on top of any window.

Speaker performance was lackluster, but that is common on most business notebooks. They work well for streaming audio or having a VOIP chat, but for movies and entertainment the headphone jack is a much better alternative.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Yes, Lenovo significantly changed the look, feel, and layout of the keyboard on the T400s. After you pick yourself up off the floor from fainting, you will quickly see most of the changes are for the better. The feel of the keys remains mostly untouched from past models ... outside of the fact that the spacebar seems to click loudly if you press it on the edges. The biggest change comes with a redesigned function key section, offering larger "escape" and "delete" keys. Through in-depth research Lenovo found that those two keys were used more than other function keys. As a result they doubled the height, and moved the position of the insert key and F1 key.

I think the coolest difference is the new media buttons and power button. The power switch and mute keys light up when activated, so instead of the power icon showing up on the bottom edge of your screen, the button itself is the indicator. The caps lock button now features a translucent window with an LED that lights up to indicate the caps lock is turned on. One thing that is missing is an AC and battery indicator light facing you with the screen open, as they are now external only.

The T400s offers one feature I have yet to see on any other notebook to date: a speaker AND microphone mute button. While I am not sure how often I personally need to turn off my microphone, if you videoconference or use Skype frequently then a quickly accessed mute button would come in handy. Another minor change is the key tolerances have decreased, meaning there is less room for crumbs or dust to fall in-between keys.

The new touchpad is different, but I am having a hard time figuring out if that is a good or bad thing. The old design used a slightly rough matte plastic finish, which gave some traction and made it easy to move your finger around even if sweaty. The new design has a raised dimple finish with a softer texture that feels strange. I found myself increasing the sensitivity in the Synaptics control panel to make movement feel more fluid, but then found it too sensitive. It seems that you need to apply consistent pressure when moving over the new touchpad, where before it was easy to flick your finger across. I think if the bumpy surface was glossy or more slick I might enjoy it more.

Another change is the shape and size of the trackpad buttons. The buttons have a radius contour that goes through the buttons to the edges where they meet the palmrest. From a design standpoint they flow better with the notebook than previous attempts, and it is even easier to access them from the touchpad now.

Ports and Features

Port selection on the T400s has been greatly improved over the T400 model. New to the back of the T400s is an eSATA port for storage expansion and DisplayPort out, giving you digital video from the notebook itself. Just like the T400 it has three USB ports, one through a combo USB/eSATA port. Lenovo has kept the VGA port for legacy connections, since it is still used frequently for projectors. With the decrease in thickness the T400s lost its dual card slots, only keeping an ExpressCard/34 slot. The T400s offers a docking station connector on the bottom, but it is a new design that is incompatible with older models. The last big change came with the T60, and I can just hope that this docking station format stays the same for a few notebook generations to come.

Performance

The Lenovo ThinkPad T400s Touch is the first "official" Windows 7 notebook we have had in for review. This means it has all the proper manufacturer drivers, and the newest Windows 7 designed utilities. On most review notebooks we have personally upgraded to Windows 7, we have seen decent performance bumps, but this was not the case with the T400s. From the first review the only items that have changed are the OS, new touchscreen, SSD from a different manufacturer, and RAM, which is now double at 4GB. All aspects of day-to-day performance seem very snappy, including boot times, application load times, and HD movie playing. When we went to test its synthetic performance we noticed a pretty drastic hit to PCMark05 and a slightly smaller hit to wPrime. 3DMark06 was the only benchmark that actually increased. Some of this may be driver related, since technically Windows 7 hasn't officially launched, but it still goes against what we have seen on other computers. Another possibility is the touch surface is polling for gestures, and taking up precious CPU cycles. The average user would probably never notice this, as we can't actually see any performance drop in day-to-day use.

wPrime Processor Performance Benchmark (lower scores mean better performance):

PCMark05 Overall Performance Benchmark (higher scores mean better performance):

Synthetic Gaming Performance using 3DMark06 (higher scores mean better performance):

HDTune Hard Drive Performance Benchmark:

Heat and Noise

We found the T400s Touch ran slightly warmer than the standard T400s in our tests. While both notebooks showed the same heat zones, the T400s Touch was about 3-4 degrees warmer in each area. Some of this could be related to room temperature, or it could be related to certain components being able to run hotter or faster under Windows 7 while under a moderate load. Overall nothing ran too hot to be non-lap-friendly, but it was a surprising find. Fan noise was similar to the standard T400s, staying off for most of time, only coming on while benchmarking or small bursts to cool internal components. External temperatures listed below are shown in degrees Fahrenheit.

Battery Life

Battery life was somewhat of a surprise with the T400s Touch. Even with the added power consumption of the touch interface, it still managed to get better battery life than the non-touch version. In our battery test with the screen brightness set to 70%, wireless active, and the system on the Balanced profile, it managed 6 hours and 19 minutes. The standard T400s only managed 5 hours and 48 minutes under similar conditions. This might be one area where Windows 7 shines, with less background processes or more efficient use of the processor. Both of these times are much less than the T400 with an extended battery though, almost reaching 10 hours with its 9-cell extended battery.

Conclusion

The Lenovo ThinkPad T400s Touch is a very cool idea, bringing a touch interface to a standard notebook. It gives users the capability to interact with the computer on a much more natural level and has huge potential for CAD applications or even messing around while surfing the web. The only problem right now that I see is that it was added to an already expensive model, putting it well out of reach for most users. Adding it on the base T400, which starts $749, instead of the T400s which starts at $1,599 would have been the better choice. Besides some preproduction quirks we saw it was a good implementation that didn't even affect battery life. If you are looking at the T400s currently, and could expand the budget by $400, it might be worth adding to the notebook for future uses.

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