Lenovo Thinkpad T440s Ultrabook Review

If you’ve ever worked in a professional environment for an extended period of time, chances are you’ve used an IBM-come-Lenovo ThinkPad at some point. Their simple black rectangle designs with the little red dot on the keyboard are downright iconic, but although Lenovo has made smaller refinements on the exterior design of some models, they have been evolving the guts and feature set of these machines to true ultrabook-level hardware.

To that end, the latest notebook in the T-series, the Lenovo ThinkPad T440s, is one of the company’s slimmest and lightest to date (save for the X1 Carbon series). It weighs in at 3.5lbs (without the extra battery) and is under 0.8 inches at its thickest point. Lenovo also asserts that this machine is tougher than past models in the family, with a new open/close mechanism, hinges that allow a 180-degree swing, and the removal of latches. The entire touchpad area has been redesigned, too.

So is the ThinkPad T440s the same old business laptop with a slimmer profile and a couple of chassis tweaks, or is it a true evolution of the T-series?

The Lenovo Thinkpad T440s we tested runs Windows 8 Pro and has an Intel Core i5-4200U (up to 2.6GHz) inside with Intel HD Graphics 4400 and 4GB of system memory (although it's worth noting that there's only one DIMM, so that 4GB is single-channel). Lenovo opted for a snappy 128GB SSD for storage, which is ideal for performance although a bit lean in terms of capacity (larger SSDs can be chosen on the model at a price point). However, being that this is a business-oriented notebook, many customers may have access to files and data stored on company servers, thus alleviating some of the burden of local storage.

The 14-inch display offers 1920x1080 resolution and touchscreen capabilities, and there’s a 720p HD webcam with low-light sensitivity, as well. As far as ports go, there are three USB 3.0 (two on the left side, one on the right), a 4-in-1 SD card reader, Ethernet, lock port, and headphone/mic combo jack. Video ports include VGA and mini-DisplayPort (with audio), and for connectivity Lenovo included 802.11ac/b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0.

You have several battery options with the T440s; there’s a 3-cell battery built into the notebook itself, but Lenovo also included removable 3-cell and 6-cell batteries, too, which allows you to tailor how much battery life you can rely on from your machine depending on you’re requirements.

And now, let’s talk about the design of this thing and what software options come pre-loaded.