Lenovo Thinkpad T440s Ultrabook Review

Performance Summary: The Lenovo ThinkPad T440s’ performance could be described as solid but unspectacular in certain areas. Solid, yes, because it hung with or exceeded the competition in virtually all of our benchmarks, but unspectacular because it was constantly beaten out by Lenovo’s own Yoga 2 Pro, which has strikingly similar specs. More on that shortly.


It can be hard to get juiced up over a business-ish ThinkPad that looks an awful lot like ThinkPads of times past, but Lenovo did a good job of maintaining the series’ classic looks without bowing to them. The company completely redesigned the touchpad area, and it’s a much smoother-looking and cleaner user experience. The chassis is still a black, boxy design, but it takes on a slimmer, minimalistic profile, with detail finishes like blacked-out ports and hidden speakers. Even the keyboard is notable, with large keys that offer a subtle yet satisfying click and decent travel. Further, this ThinkPad has a touchscreen (an impressively crisp and vibrant one), which is a fairly new development for business machines. Finally, in operation, it’s also worth noting that the T440s was extremely quiet.

One item to be aware of is the fact that Lenovo, for whatever reason, put a single 4GB DIMM in the T440s, which somewhat hamstrings the memory performance. There's an open DIMM slot inside the chassis, and for next to nothing you can opt for another 2GB to 4GB module to significantly boost the system's performance. We'd strongly advise this, as you're leaving performance on the table beyond just that of the extra memory, if you run in single channel mode.

The system comes loaded with software, and some of it is potentially useful while other items could be considered just bloat. That said, a lot of it is Lenovo-branded, and thus there are many dedicated tools and utilities to use.

One nagging aspect of this system stems from its price compared to the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro that we recently reviewed. This ThinkPad T440s costs $1,309 as configured, but the Yoga 2 Pro is about $300 cheaper--yet the less expensive product offers a higher-res (although physically smaller) display, an attractive convertible design, and mostly better benchmark scores to boot. It just depends on your use case. ThinkPads are designed with the work and enterprise environment in mind. The keyboard area on the ThinkPad T440S is more spacious as well. 

Still, overall we’d have to give the Lenovo ThinkPad T440s a thumbs up for solid all-around performance, a clean redesign, and its sturdy, resilient, industrial-strength construction.