Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X230 is a thin and light laptop with an Ivy Bridge processor.
Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

A little over a year ago, just before ultrabook mania got its start, we crowned Lenovo’s ThinkPad X220 a near-masterpiece of ultralight laptop design. The 12.1-inch, 3.3-pound laptop had power to spare, nearly five hours of battery life with the stock 6-cell unit, and a solid array of ports.

Now, Lenovo is back with an update, the ThinkPad X230, which aims to make you forget all about its big brother.

If you aren’t paying attention, you might not notice many of the upgrades. For starters, the 12.1-inch screen has grown to 12.5 inches, though resolution at 1366 x 768 pixels remains unchanged. The CPU is now an Ivy Bridge model (2.6GHz Core i5), and two of the three USB ports have been upgraded to USB 3.0.

Otherwise, you still get integrated graphics, 4GB of RAM, and even the same size hard drive (320GB). For some unknown reason, Lenovo has even left the enormous ExpressCard slot intact (remember those?), alongside an SD card slot, VGA, and a DisplayPort output. The unit weighs in just a shade over its predecessor, at 3.4 pounds. The price: 50 bones less than the X220, at $1250 (as configured).

At Lenovo, black is the new brushed aluminum. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Performance figures are a bit muddy at this point. I haven’t seen enough Ivy Bridge machines to know how benchmarks will compare, but the X230 is at least a bit faster than the pokey IdeaPad Y480 I reviewed last month, despite having a lower-class Core i5 instead of an i7. The graphics benchmarks are hardly inspiring, but it’s impressive that many of the tests would run at all considering the unit has no discrete graphics card.

At barely 4 hours of video playback time, battery life has taken a hit from the nearly 5 hours the X220 offered, but the larger screen may be the culprit there. (Brightness is about identical this time out.)

And then there’s the keyboard. With its Ivy Bridge units, Lenovo is migrating all its laptops to island-style keyboards. And if you’re familiar with the IdeaPad keyboard, you know what to expect. Like many, I’m already nostalgic for the old design. Lenovo’s chicklets are better than most vendors’ renditions, but I continue to make more mistakes typing on them than on the rightfully lauded old keyboard. The backlash, I’m sure, is going to be palpable.

Like the X220, Lenovo also saddles the X230 with another iffy clickpad that is incredibly small and still a bit buggy (though nowhere near the nightmare of the X220′s). It doesn’t miss clicks like last year’s model, but it just doesn’t track perfectly. Fortunately, the pointing stick remains as an option for red nubbin devotees.

None of this niggling is likely to matter much, as the X230 now finds itself in a difficult position where an ultrabook like the MacBook Air is more powerful, lighter, and packs in a bigger screen — all for just $50 more. Even Lenovo has its own ultra-sexy, ultra-slim X1 Carbon getting ready to reinvent this category this summer. On its merits, the X230 is far from a bad machine. It is, however, a laptop that suddenly finds itself without much of a market anymore.

So, who’s ready to drop four figures on one?

WIRED Configuration covers all the bases, particularly for business users clinging to legacy peripherals. Street cred in the boardroom.

TIRED Suddenly thick and heavy in an ultrabook world. Disappointing battery life vs. its predecessor. Acceptable but uninspiring performance. Keyboard switcharoo will cause pitchforks to be branded.

Japanese tech corp Fujitsu is said to be preparing a  a 7-inch Android tablet for release later this year. The new device comes in the wake of the company’s recent release of a  10.1-inch Windows 7 tab in the US and European territories.

According to gadget site T3, the slate is said to launch with Android 3.1, with a an update to Android Ice Cream Sandwich probable when the new OS variant is released at the end of 2011.

The unnamed tablet will be positioned as an entry level device and have a price point of around £200; a departure from its Windows slate offering that was aimed mainly at business users and came with a higher price tag.

Spec details are thin on the ground at present, but we’ll endeavour to bring you more news when we get it.

You can’t deny Dell some hard-fought gee-whiz cred with the new Inspiron Duo.

In a world of commoditized portables, it is nothing if not a unique product. Show it off to your friends; it looks like a netbook, and you pop open the laptop-like clamshell and wait for the bored expression to appear. Then comes the sucker punch: you rotate the screen horizontally within its frame and snap the laptop back shut. Ta-da, it’s a freakin’ tablet, bro! People are duly impressed. It’s a neat trick and, at the very least, a clever feat of engineering.

But what is the Dell Inspiron Duo? Cut through the mystery and you will find — sorry to burst your bubble — a Windows netbook with a rotating touchscreen.

And that begs the question, what is it good for?

Well, we’re still working on that one.

This is the problem with dual-function gadgets in general: They rarely do either of the things they’re designed for very well. As a netbook, the Duo is at least passable. While it’s heavier than other 10-inch netbooks by up to half a pound, it’s well designed and looks good, and the 1366 x 768 screen’s brightness is about average for the category. But performance is unfortunately poor all around (a 1.5-GHz Atom doesn’t get you very far), and the two measly USB ports could stand an upgrade.

As a tablet, the Duo fares considerably worse. Here, its three pounds of heft are way too much for extended use, and the clamshell design adds an uncomfortable thickness to the device that makes it hard to hold. The screen also suffers from the same poor viewing-angle problems that sunk the Streak 7. If you’re not holding it dead on, the screen is virtually illegible.

Of course, the biggest problem here really isn’t Dell’s fault, it’s that Windows just doesn’t work very well for touchscreen devices, especially not on a small scale like this. Use the Duo in tablet mode for more than three minutes and your skin starts to crawl. You want to get something done quickly. You try to hit Control-C. Soon you find you’re reaching over and over for a keyboard that isn’t there. Except, of course, it is. Thank God for that.

WIRED 320GB hard drive is bigger than my laptop’s. Flipping system works well, feels sturdy. Dell Stage custom launcher app loads automatically in tablet mode, makes Windows a bit more useful as a slate. Duo Audio Station ($100 more) adds much-improved audio and a vertical docking system.

TIRED Tediously slow all around; get used to a lot of waiting. Screen is hideous. Too heavy for regular, table-free use.

Photos courtesy of Dell