Marin85 wrote:I don´t get all that about T400s. If I want small and light lappy, I would go for X200 or X30x. To be honest, with the X30x series I just fail to see the place of T400s among the other ThinkPad lines currently. Also, X301 and T400s are quite close in price.
Some people want the bigger screen, and the higher resolution, without the increased eyestrain that comes from cramming the same resolution into a smaller screen.
The T400s has a few distinct advantages over the X301, the docking station support and express card slot, as well as the eSATA port, being the most notable. Oh, and how could I forget - much faster CPU.
The X200 series takes the crown as far as battery life goes, but takes the resolution problem to the extreme: WXGA is too limiting for some people, WXGA+ on 12" is too hard on the eyes for many people.
Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to play with an X200 laptop for a long time, but the one and only sample of X200s that I examined on display at a store felt really cheap.
Not to mention that X200 did to X6x what T61/T400 did to T60 - introduced the widescreen format, but with such a thick bezel, that the laptop's footprint only increased. It is wider than X6x, but just as tall.
I wish I had the opportunity to compare the X20x/X30x/T400s side-by-side to see how the size and weight differences actually feel in real life. Based on raw numbers, I'd say the T400s will feel much closer to the X30x than to the T400.
It also seems to me that the poor naming choice for the T400s also confuses people as to its true features and merits. From an engineering point of view, it should have been called X400, no doubt about it. However, names are chosen by the marketing department (I assume), and have little to do with engineering, and more with product positioning. Lenovo was clearly aiming at the same group of users with this laptop as it was with the T400. At the same time, it does not seem they are going to discontinue the regular T400, so it seems like the confusion will remain.
It may go deeper than that, though. My personal feeling, shared by some people on these forums, and quite a few outside of it, is that with the latest installments of the T-series (61, and now 400/500), the series which was once considered flagship lost a lot of its glamour.
Between the increasing complaints about shoddy build quality (creaking plastics, flexing keyboards), increasing size and thickness, the fact that the cheaper R61/R400 models are now virtually indistinguishable from the T, ridiculously low base configurations (to slash prices to rock bottom), I bet there were enough people wondering whether there is any good reason to go with a Lenovo T, when the competition from DELL, HP and a few others, is right around the corner.
The T400s introduced a lot of innovation at the same time, to a series which hasn't seen much (if any) of it since Lenovo took over IBM's PC division.
