Previously I did a showcase on an x220 thinkpad. And in a lot of ways it was the last of a generation of thinkpads. This time we are looking at the beginning of a new generation. The Lenovo Thinkpad X250. Technically the x240 was, but I, like almost all the users, hated the touchpad so much, and lenovo came out with the x250 so quickly, I like to forget it even existed, and other than the touchpad and CPU generation they were essentially identical as far as layout, features, and ports.
So the introduction of the chiclet style keyboard started with the x230, but that was on the old chassis, and the x240 gave us this newer chassis, but with a touchpad with no physical buttons. This shouldn’t have been such a big deal as many other manufactures, by that point, had already switched over to a buttonless touchpad. The problem with it was two fold. One, using a trackpoint with the lack of physical buttons was a big annoyance, and two the drivers for the touchpad were just… Trash. It really was bad, the mouse jumped all over the place, would register clicks when you didn’t click, etc. I do not recommend getting an x240, unless it is basically free. The X250 improved the mouse by giving us physical buttons and improving the drivers. If I make a suggestion, make sure to get the drivers off lenovo’s website and not let windows install them automatically..
Back to the keyboard. The full sized keycaps and the 7 row layout is gone. The keyboard itself is pretty decent. I’ll be honest, it feels like home to me. As much as I prefer the x220’s keyboard, my first real work laptop was a w530 with this style of keyboard, and it just feels right to me. It’s kinda a weird experience. We have a keyboard backlight with 3 levels, off, dim, and slightly less dim. The one thing I am grateful for is they didn’t slam a lot of keys down the right hand side of the keyboard like some manufactures are want to do, and the arrow keys are more or less the same size. Some systems have the up and down arrows as tiny little caps with the right and left being massive in comparison. Makes it hard to use.
This new chassis introduces a lot of new benefits. The xseires of laptops are meant to be thin, light, mobile. And they introduced a lot of features just for that. This X250 has a bridged battery, meaning that there are two batteries, an internal one, and a removable one, allowing hot swapping of batteries, and being able to pick larger capacity batteries. It is over half an inch thinner and narrower, and several ounces lighter. The physical size difference is very noticeable in the hand, and in the laptop bag.
We have updated ports with USB 3, mini display, 5ghz wireless, upgraded bluetooth, and a much much much better screen with an actual option for a 1920×1080 FHD IPS screen. I’ve done this upgrade on other laptops and it VERY worth the upgrade and far less difficult than I expected.
We have a 15 watt cpu on a 14nm process, meaning it runs cooler and faster while consuming less power.
There is a more accurate fingerprint sensor.
We have better speakers, still not good, just “better”, in that they are thin sounding, with little to no bass and very little top end, but they at least sound like they are near you and not blocks away shouting at you through a tube.
Graphics is also updated, with the HD5500, supporting directx 12. This is still not a gaming laptop, but at least for the applications that support it, we have it available. Again I will be doing a performance comparison of the laptops in another video in a couple of weeks, so stay subscribed for that.
And now we have to look at the price. You can get a good one of these for about $140-175 on ebay right now. That’s CHEAPER Than an x220. No brainer right? Well yeah, it kinda is. And honestly? This has been my go to recommendation for 4 years or so now. They were insanely popular, came off lease cheap, and have stayed cheap, and it is not hard to find them in really good condition for that price. If you’re willing to have a scratch or two you can even find them under $100 right now if you look hard. They have continued to outperform just about any new computer you could get for anywhere near the price. And it has only just been recently with the new athlon silver 3020u cpus I reviewed recently, that they have caught up to a 6 year old mid tier laptop, and even then in just a few categories.
But they are not perfect. There are a few annoyances that I would like to point out.
One downside is that we lose a dimm slot for ram, meaning we max out at 8gb of ddr3l. Again I know there are 16 gig dimms available, but being that they sit at $120+ per dimm… that’s a steep price to pay for the upgrade, you could almost buy ANOTHER x250 for that amount and whatever is consuming the ram, just run it on that computer.
They just have a sata for the drives, no nvme. It is sata 6.0gb/s, so it isn’t leaving too much on the table, but nvme storage is coming down in price and up in capacity. You can get the shorter 2242 ssds, but finding a higher capacity one of reasonable price is hard, most of them are now nvme and incompatible with the slot. This does mean you can have tiered storage, but both running at the same speed. So you’re really just adding capacity.
Another issue I personally have is the display out options. Going back a few years, the vga was a nice addition, as many projectors and monitors still had this as the main way to connect. But the last couple of years that has really phased out as technology has had a few upgrades, so unless you have some pretty legacy hardware it isn’t very useful. The other option is the mini display port, and at the time this made sense. It had a much bigger bandwidth than HDMI when this laptop was released, allowing for up to 4k resolution at 60hz, and being that this was designed for a business, it meant that higher resolution screens, meant for editing photo and video, could be used. HDMI at the time was not capable of providing the bandwidth needed for these displays. The problem today is that most consumer grade products use hdmi, so a dongle or specific cable would need to be used to connect up. I hate dongles.
We also drop from 3 available USB ports to just two. The biggest issue I have with this, is I have some external accessories, like an external DVD drive that doesn’t always get enough power from the USB ports, so plugs into two at the same time. Not really possible directly on this laptop.
And lastly, if you are thinking of getting one of these, seriously consider getting a docking station, they can be found under $20 with a spare power supply if you shop around on ebay. Gives you plenty of ports, and a permanent place to park your laptop, and it’s compatible all the way up through the x270, if you plan on upgrading later.
I have a vinyl skin on mine, I would highly recommend one of those as well, it does a great job of keeping the laptop looking nice, and scratch free, and they peel off easily and cleanly. I’ll put a couple of links in the description for those.