Hasta La Gadget!

In a world where not many things are certain (other than death and taxes, of course), it seems that the now familiar ThinkPad design from Lenovo has been a mainstay for years, being noted for their build quality, battery life as well as relatively lightweight chassis amongst others. Well, Lenovo seems to have gotten a little bit more adventurous this time around, with the latest ThinkPad T431s, which happens to be the first device that is based on an all new design for the ThinkPad series.

According to the Lenovo blog, the entire ThinkPad T431s design came about after Lenovo “shadowed” both ThinkPad and non-ThinkPad users alike, in addition to checking out just what other young adults in different countries liked over a nine month period. This “gestation” period, so to speak, allowed Lenovo to pick up on what folks liked and did not when using notebooks, and armed with such information, resulted in the ThinkPad T431s’ final design. What do you think of the departure from its traditional look? It seems that the ThinkPad T431s will come with 4GB RAM (up to 12GB), a 14” display at 1,600×900 resolution, a 320GB hard drive (SSD optional), and a choice of either Windows 7 or Windows 8, as it is due to hit the market sometime later this April for $949 a pop.

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Lenovo might not be ready to officially reveal the full 2013 ThinkPad range, but it’s succeeded in sparking some early interest in the unannounced T431s and X230s by putting their manuals on its Chinese webpage. The documents don’t tell us anything about what hardware will be found inside either machine, but as Laptop Reviews note, included diagrams do hint at what they might look like. Akin to the unreleased ThinkPad Helix and Edge notebooks, the traditional dedicated TrackPoint buttons below the keyboard have been done away with, in favor of integrating them into a larger trackpad. Something we also saw on the Helix that’ll be carried through to the T431s and X230s is a slight alteration to the function keys — they’ll be the secondary use of hotkeys for brightness, volume and such, rather than the other way around.

If the diagrams are accurate, another difference from the T430 and X230 2012 models will be the hinges, which’ll sink part of the top panel behind the body, much like the X1 Carbon and Helix / Edge ThinkPads due later this year. Screen sizes, however, will remain unchanged: the X230s will have a 12.5-inch panel (1,366 x 768 res) and the T431s a 14-incher (1,600 x 900). While we’re missing key hardware specs at the moment, at least potential buyers can start pondering whether they’ll be down for the design revisions or not. We’ve linked the PDF manuals below, but if you’re looking for more than illustrations, you’ll either need to know Chinese or be prepared to get busy with a translator.

Filed under: Laptops, Lenovo

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Source: Lenovo T431s manual (PDF), Lenovo X230s manual (PDF), Laptop Reviews