Look and feel

The X120e has the same exact chassis as the X100e, and considering that's what we liked so much about the original, we've no qualms with that. We prefer the matte, black plastic cover to the ThinkPad Edge's glossy, fingerprint-attracting lid and the fact that the entire thing is one uniform color. However, there's a small part of us that wishes the lid had the same soft, rubberish coating as other classic ThinkPads. Still, those that are fans of the traditional ThinkPad look will join in the appreciation of the simple, yet refined aesthetic. The all-plastic system feels as good as one would expect, and the screen hinges feel solid and don't wobble.

The X120e is slightly wider and longer than the average 10-inch netbook, but it's still incredibly portable. The 1.1-inch thick machine was compact enough to fit into our shoulder bag and leave us with plenty of spare room for our DSLR and oversized wallet. We still take a bit of an issue with the horizontally protruding six-cell battery -- it juts out the rear, which isn't only awkward, but it also puts the system at 3.3 pounds. That's still lighter than HP's 3.4-pound Pavilion dm1z, but no doubt the ThinkPad's battery is oddly placed in comparison to HP's improved battery design. The one major difference between the former X100e chassis and the X120e? The addition of a HDMI port. Other than that, the laptop is still home to three USB 2.0 ports, VGA and Ethernet sockets, a mic / headphone combo jack, and a SD card slot. The yellow colored USB port can charge your gadgets even the system is powered down.

Keyboard, touchpad, and screen

The X120e has the same keyboard as the Edge 11 and the X100e, and our extreme love for the black, matte curved keys is stronger than ever. As we've said many times before, it feels as if the keys have been molded especially for our fingertips and the deck itself doesn't have any flex or noticeable bend. Writing the brunt of this review on the panel itself didn't require us to shift our usual hand position too much, either -- the function row has been shrunken down, but there are two full sized Shift keys.

Like the X100e, there's no lack of ways to push around the cursor on the X120e -- there's the signature red TrackPoint (or nub) smack in the middle of the keyboard, and a smaller 3.0 x 1.5-inch touchpad below. We still prefer the pointing stick, but the touchpad is decent for navigating as well. It's smaller than that on the dm1z, but it does have two dedicated buttons rather than those sometimes-frustrating integrated button ClickPads. That said, the multitouch gestures on the HP system seemed more responsive, and while two-finger scrolling on the ThinkPad works, it's jittery in comparison.

Thankfully, Lenovo's also kept the matte 11.6-inch, 1366 x 768-resolution display untouched. Cutting out the sometimes distracting glare of glossy displays, the matte screen is still sufficiently bright and horizontal viewing angles continue to be better than vertical ones. Tilting the screen back to about 40 degrees caused a bit of color distortion, but it didn't really prove too problematic when watching the Rango trailer with the X120e on our lap. The webcam on the top of the bezel is still optimized for low-light situations. That still creeps us out just a bit, but it did work quite well when we turned down the lights -- our face was still pretty clear to our friend on Skype. The speakers on the front lip of the laptop were quite loud at full blast, and while they were fine for hearing that call and Jon Stewart's voice in a Daily Show clip, listening to Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow" was fairly tinny.

Performance and graphics

Just like the Pavilion dm1z, the ThinkPad X120e is powered by AMD's dual-core 1.6GHz E-350 processor, though it has 4GB of RAM compared to the HP's three gigs. (There entry level $399 X120e will have a single-core E-240 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and three-cell battery.) The benchmarks below prove much of what we already knew about AMD's Fusion Zacate – it absolutely wrecks the previous Neo platform and Intel's Atom on performance, while handily beating Intel's integrated graphics. Those high numbers also translated to really peppy everyday performance. There's no doubt that the system just felt faster than any Atom netbook or Neo-powered system we've used. The machine kept up with us as we wrote this review in Microsoft Word Starter 2010, had over eight tabs open in Chrome (one of them being Pandora), and simultaneously ran TweetDeck, Trillian, Skype, GIMP, and Windows Media Player in the background. Even when we threw a 1080p clip into the mix, the system remained really responsive. Similar to the dm1z, we saw a bit of lag when we tried to install a large file like Batman: Arkham Asylum, but you can always pull out the 320GB, 7,200rpm hard drive and throw a SSD into this sucker. Sure, it'll cost ya, but can you really put a price on faster install and launch times?