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4.5 stars
"Combination of a Sleek, light, powerful and feature rich notebook!"
Pros: Amazing power, ultra mobility
Cons: Somewhat small screen, minor bugs in ultra dock
Summary: After 3 months of intensive browsing and reviewing various laptops, I finally chose the X32 because it gave me a great combination of powerful performance, great mobility and all the latest features. I'm not a road warrior, but a frequent road traveler you might say with frequent travel - 1-2 trips per week needing notebook to be carried along. Hence I didnt need the lightest of laptops such as X40, which are a pound lighter than X32. At the same time, I love macines that boot and shutdown in a jiffy and simply cause all the basic applications to fly by - so I went for X32 which has 5400 rpm drive as well as the 2 Ghz processor plus 1 GB RAM - a powerhorse. My take is that all software and OS manufacturers will continually upgrade their software with richer features in the next 2-3 years and for these applications to continue to run fast enough, I need to ensure I have enough power.
The X32 I have is both highly mobile - its very light, yet powerful. Boots and shuts down in less than a minute. The integrated wireless is just great and gives added freedom to get connected anywhere. The keyboard is fine as well for this thin and light laptop - once you get used to the smaller backspace, ctrl and shift keys.
There is no integrated CD drive and this is by design, however the ultrabase provides for this. I would say that the ultrabase is really an addon and luxury and not required for anything really important - you may be good with just a USB port powered CD drive of your choice.
On the cons side, the smaller screen does cause a bit of eye strain, if you have anything less than normal eyesight, think twice about buying this notebook, otherwise, this is no big deal and you will get used to it. The other minor bug is the erratic functioning of the CD drive on the ultrabase.
Otherwise, there is very little to complain about and this is a fabulous notebook for those who do want solid performance and an ultra light notebook, but not necessarily a featherweight notebook. The performance gain over lighter notebooks such as X40 is far too much as compared to the extra 1 pound weight of the X32. More importantly, this helps you consider your X32 as the main and all purpose notebook given its superior performance and not just a travel notebook with the main notebook being a heavier / high performance notebook or desktop.
All other ports USB, firewire etc. work great - the tiny tracking ball at the centre is much improve from earlier thinkpad versions and awesome....GO FOR THIS NOTEBOOK!!
And of course, the battery life is great as well - gives almost 3-4 hours. So if you are a frequent traveler, focussed on work related tasks with high productivity requirements, ultra mobility and good travel battery life - this is your laptop. And the decision to compromise a pound of weight for a huge performance gain is a very wise one.
