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Lenovo ThinkPad X230s unveiled in China: a thinner and lighter 12-incher
Who says a carbon fiber chassis with sufficient cooling for a Core i7 has to be heavy? The ThinkPad X230s, revealed on Lenovo's Chinese site following a partial leak in January, looks like a significantly more portable version of last year's X230, with a weight of just 1.28kg (2.8 pounds) and a minimum thickness of 17.7mm (0.7 inches). There's room inside for up to 8GB of RAM, either a 240GB SSD or 1TB HDD, fingerprint reader, 720p webcam, VGA and Mini DisplayPort outputs, two USB 3.0 ports and keyboard backlighting. It's a Windows 8 machine, of course, with shortcut keys and a gesture-optimized TrackPad. We're on the lookout for further details, including any pricing, and will update this post soon as we have some. Update: We're going to hazard a guess that the resolution is 1,366 x 768, based on the January leak. Chinese pricing looks to be around 7,399 yuan ($1,200). [Thanks, Os]
ThinkPad T431s and X230s leak on Lenovo's site, mainly reveal design changes
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.
