A while back I reviewed my ThinkPad T410 -- a notebook purchased for and used as my primary development machine. While I still believe that the T410 brought changes to the ThinkPad line that could best be described as "two steps forward, one step back", after several months of use I wouldn't hesitate to describe my experience with it as "good". It's been a solid, reliable performer for the time I've used it and has survived 8-10 hours of use 5-7 days per week plus a couple trips.
When the T420 was announced, I decided to get one. On paper it seemed like an improvement over the T410 in pretty much every way: it offered a higher resolution screen (albeit one with a 16:9 aspect ratio), a newer CPU/chipset, vastly improved power management, and some structural improvements that seemed promising. Now that Lenovo and UPS have fulfilled their end of the bargain, it's time to see if the actual machine lives up to its paper promises.
Mechanically, the T420 is quite similar to its predecessor, although there are a few key differences.
The first major change is the location of the UltraBay: it's moved towards the front of the notebook (although still on the right-hand side), with its left edge a mere half-inch or so from the very front of the chassis. In its place (towards the rear of the notebook) are the ExpressCard slot, an SD/media reader, a USB port, and a combined USB/eSata port. When the T420 was unveiled, there was a bit of fear amongst ThinkPad fans that the new position of the UltraBay would cause increased keyboard and palmrest flex. I'm happy to say that is not the case: both areas feel quite solid even under firm pressure. They're not inflexible, but they feel sturdier than, say, similar positions on a T41. A quick look inside the chassis reveals why: the roll cage has returned to the T60 style of a hunk of solid metal rather than the perforated design found in previous generations.
Aside from the UltraBay position, not much else has changed, expandability-wise. The left-hand ports are mostly the same (although two of the four USB ports found on the T410 have been shifted to the right-hand side), and the power jack is located in the same spot. The "always-on" USB port (colored yellow) and the IEEE1394 (aka. FireWire) port have been moved to the rear of the notebook on the far right-hand side.
The overall chassis design of the T420 is visually quite similar to that of the T410. The front edge is more angular, ending with a more pronounced bevel than the slow tapering of the T410 (the T420 resembles the T510/W510 in this regard.) This makes the notebook appear a bit more "boxy", but not in a bad way -- if anything the style seems to be a little closer to previous IBM designs than recent Lenovo ones.
The lid of the notebook, however, is quite different from that of the T410. While the T410 used HEPC (high-elasticity polycarbonate, aka. "springy plastic"), the T420 uses CFRP (carbon-fiber reinforced polycarbonate). The difference is tangible: when closed, the T410's lid gives under direct pressure while the T420's lid is far more rigid. One look at the side profile of the notebooks will reveal why the change was made: the T420's screen assembly is a fraction of the thickness of that of the T410. Since HEPC will deform in response to force, a lid using it needs to provide a bit of a buffer zone between the shell of the lid assembly and the actual LCD panel. CFRP, on the other hand, can provide a much more rigid shell which in turn allows for a much thinner lid.
There are a couple other minor changes, design-wise. The "Lenovo" logo has returned to the front left corner of the lid cover (having disappeared during the T400 to T410 transition), but unlike its predecessors, looks neither cheap nor out of place. Gone is the shiny black plastic which stuck out on the dull matte of the lid's finish. In its place is a dark metallic logo that, while not inconspicuous, looks pretty fitting for a notebook costing in excess of a thousand dollars. Nostalgic ThinkPad fans will inevitably compare it to the tri-color IBM logo of old, but even in such a comparison it holds its own. (Towards the latter half of IBM's tenure, the ThinkPad logo changed from raised plastic to a simple sticker. While the new Lenovo logo still isn't as good as the raised "IBM ThinkPad" logo from the 1990s, I do think it's a step up from the sticker version found on the last few generations of IBM ThinkPads. It certainly is a better match for the current "ThinkPad" logo.)
Also of note are the positions of the indicator lights. As seems to be the case with every generation of ThinkPad, they've yet again changed position. The WLAN, and hard drive activity lights (and presumably the Bluetooth one as well) have shifted to the right-hand side of the bottom edge of the display bezel. Not a big change, but at least they're now back to the same side as they were on most of the previous generations of ThinkPad.
The microphone pickups have moved from the base of the display bezel (in the T410) to the top of the display, slightly below and to either side of the ThinkLight. I haven't used (and probably will never use) the microphone, so I can't comment on its quality -- though I'd guess that with dual pickups it's probably doing some form of positional noise cancellation.
The wide, symmetrical hinge-cover design first seen with the X300 and T400s (and carried through to the T series proper in the T410) has been preserved, and the hinges seem to be their usual sturdy selves. The latching mechanism appears to be the same as on the T410, although the release has shifted ever-so-slightly to the right. I have no complaints either way -- it does a great job of keeping the lid secured during transport, and the clamshell design helps to reduce the change of foreign objects intruding while the lid is closed.
That pretty much sums it up for the chassis changes. There are a few other visible changes, but they're best saved for what is sure to be the most anticipated section of this (and any) ThinkPad review: the section on the keyboard.
Where to start? In my T410 review I lambasted Lenovo for poor QC, citing the keyboard of my notebook as an example of this. In truth, there's nothing wrong with the T410's keyboard design per se. The problem is that since it uses the chassis, internal frame, and internal components of the notebook for support it relies on precision positioning and fairly slim manufacturing tolerances. Without starting a full-blown discussion of Lenovo's quality control, suffice it to say that I don't think the T410's manufacturing process had the necessary level of QC to allow that sort of design to succeed.
The T420's keyboard is excellent. I don't mean excellent in the sense of "better if you do some tweaking" or "better, compared to some random ODM machine". I mean it's worthy of the ThinkPad name.
Now before I get too far along with my praise of the keyboard, allow me to clarify a few things. First, the T420's keyboard is not "flex free". I've never, in my entire history of computing, used a "flex free" notebook keyboard. Every notebook keyboard will flex somewhere under some amount of strong pressure, and since their appears to be no better way to incur the wrath of certain notebook enthusiasts than to describe a keyboard as "flex free", I won't. Instead, I will say that in the past 12 months I've used the following ThinkPads: 600X, X40, X61s, T400, T500, T41, T43, R400, T410, X200, X200s, X300, X60s, T43p, T60, T60p, and T61. I would rank the T420's keyboard in the top three, alongside those used in the X300 and T60/T61. Yes, if you open the machine up you'll find that the backplate is indeed perforated like the ill-fated T400 keyboards, and yes it does use the chassis for support, and yes you can make it flex if you really press quite hard in certain spots -- but none of that means a damn thing when it comes to the keyboard's performance. The 600X had a perforated backplate too. The T4x series keyboards could (and did) flex in spots when you pressed hard. The X300 keyboard used the chassis for support. Those details don't matter when you've got a notebook with a great keyboard, and the T420 delivers.
The feel of the T420's keyboard is quite different than previous generations, to be sure. There is considerably less travel to the keys, so if you're a heavy typist like I, you may find yourself bottoming out your strokes rather often until you adjust. The keys themselves feel different too, almost as though the plastic is thinner or slightly more malleable. Time will tell how well the keys hold up, but I think that this is more of a tactile issue than a durability one. The reduction in inter-key gaps (which debuted on the T400s) may pose a slight adjustment challenge to users upgrading from prior generations of ThinkPad, particularly if said users tend to drag their fingertips over the key caps as they type. Still, the tighter spacing has generally been well-received by those users who eat while working, and while I don't fall into that category, the notable lack of dust and debris beneath my T410's keys seems to suggest this change was effective.
The enlarged Escape and Delete keys are... well they're still there. Personally I don't care for them, as I don't use them and I find their offsetting of the function keys (which I do use) to be a little bothersome. Still, it's not a big deal, and now that both my work and personal machines have the same layout I expect I'll adapt rather quickly. I expect that this is a change that users either love or simply don't care about. My advice would be to type on one for a day and see how much it bothers you. If you're only moderately annoyed by it and if you're considering using such a keyboard full-time, don't worry about it: you'll adapt, and quickly at that.
I'll start off this section by stating my bias up front: I don't use the trackpad. Ever. I used one for a couple years while using Apple's notebooks, but since every other notebook that I've owned has had a pointing stick of some sort, I've never used a trackpad on a non-Apple machine. Still, for the purpose of this review I did enable the trackpad, so I can at least provide some feedback.
Starting with the T400s, Lenovo began to change the design of the trackpads found on the T and W series ThinkPads. In addition to increasing the surface area of the pad, Lenovo's engineers added a textured surface: the trackpad is now covered in row upon row of tiny bumps. The change was met with mixed reviews, and while I'll spare you a full summary, suffice it to say that users seemed to be equally divided over whether it helped or hurt speed and accuracy. Since I'm not a trackpad user, I can't comment on how it stacks up in the wide world of touch devices -- but I can say that I had no problem using it during my tests. The bumpy surface actually feels rather interesting beneath one's finger, and I certainly don't mind the tactile experience. In terms of the actual hardware, it appears to be a standard Synaptics touchpad, and is supported much as any other similar pad would be.
Finally, let's talk about the TrackPoint. Yes, that little red nub that everyone loves, loves to hate, or simply calls profane things. It's been a ThinkPad icon for the life of the brand, so it certainly deserves reviewing.
It's there. It works exactly as you would expect.
Ok, so that was a bit glib, but what can I write? Lenovo's wisely chosen not to mess with one of the more iconic innovations in mobile computing. Sometimes it's a good thing not to have changes to review...
Given my line of work (software development) there's not much that I can say about the display. Since I don't use it for graphics, color accuracy isn't something that I notice, care about, or even can measure. That leaves brightness, viewing angles, and contrast ratio as the three key details that can't be gathered from a spec. sheet. In order: plenty, not great, and better than the T410.
The panel that I've got in my T420 is an AU Optronics panel, model number B140RW02 V1. It looks great head-on, and blacks seem a good bit better than my T410's panel. Viewing angles are average, that is to say they're wide horizontally and narrow vertically. The LED backlight is plenty bright, although I have no idea how well the display holds up in sunlight (typically if I'm outdoors I'm not doing any computer-related work.)
Regarding the resolution, I'll say this: I can deal with 1600x900. My T410 is WXGA+ (1440x900), and that's acceptable for my work -- so an additional 160 pixels on the X axis can only help. I don't watch movies or play games, so the benefits of 16:9 are lost on me, but at least the shift in aspect ratios didn't really prove much of a problem for me.
There's pretty much no way to discuss the "feel" or "fit and finish" of a ThinkPad without starting a flamewar, but since I was always the sort of kid who experimented with AC power, here goes.
The T420 feels like a premium notebook. Lenovo's gotten a lot of flak starting with the T60 for producing "cheap feeling" notebooks. Having discussed this issue with dozens of people over the last couple of years, I've come to the conclusion that it's partially due to branding issues. I've met several people who criticized the T400 for feeling "cheap" in comparison to the "IBM T60" -- each of them blissfully unaware that despite the IBM logos that adorned a large number of T60s, IBM had absolutely nothing to do with the model's production. It's not just a brand issue though; there are (in my opinion) a number of areas of various models that did make them feel inferior to their predecessors.
I'm happy to say that the T420 feels good. The lid, while not as rubbery as that of the X300 or T410, feels comparable to that of the T40 series ThinkPads: matte, slightly coarse, and easy to grasp with no fear of slippage. The body is surprisingly resistant to deformation under pressure -- more so than the T41 that sits beside me as I write this review. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, there is very little play in the palmrests: the right side is quite solid (see Ports, etc. above), and the left side gives only slightly under firm pressure. (Disassembly of the notbook reveals a possible reason: the internal skeleton of the notebook provides an excellent, solid magnesium frame which supports the plastic of the palmrest quite well.) The speakers have a fine mesh covering them; a nightmare in a dirty environment but a boone for "fit and finish". Finally, the top function keys are tastefully designed and well-built: the power button features a lit ring which pulses gently when the notebook is suspended, the mute button lights up with an unobtrusive orange light when activated, and the volume rocker has a crisp tactile response. Some people have said that "you buy a ThinkPad for the little things", and by that standard the T420 is the first Lenovo-designed notebook that I can recommend.
I can't comment. I've owned the notebook for less than a week as of this writing, and short of actively abusing it there is no way for me to assess its durability in such a short time.
I'm not going to spend too much time reviewing the performance of the machine. There are three reasons for this. The first is that artificial benchmarks paint a very incomplete picture, and even if they are reproducible they probably aren't very useful for most users. The second is that my workload and software stack is wildly different than that of most users: my notebooks tend to be used for software development with virtually no multimedia and no gaming. Finally, and perhaps most importantly: the hardware simply isn't that special. Notebook hardware is pretty standardized these days, and Lenovo's hardware tends to be about as close to an Intel reference platform as you can get. So how does my T420 perform? About like every other notebook with a Core i3-2310M and Sandy Bridge chipset. How's the disk? Exactly like any other second-generation X25-M. There's not even that much to write about network throughput: the wired NIC is GigE (and can, as expected, sustain GigE speeds), and since there's not much metal in the immediate vicinity of the WLAN antennas, wireless performance is pretty much defined by the environment -- which makes any review that I can do rather pointless.
Not all is lost, though. I do have a few benchmarks that I believe are every bit as useful as those found in major publications. Here are the results:
| System | TPWRGBBCMarks (lower is better) |
|---|---|
| ThinkPad T60 (Core 2 Duo T7200, 3 GB RAM) | 35 |
| ThinkPad T500 (Core 2 Duo P8600, 4 GB RAM) | 27 |
| ThinkPad T410 (Core i5-520M, 4 GB RAM) | 19 |
| ThinkPad T420 (Core i3-2310M, 4 GB RAM) | 15 |
The TPWRGBBCMarks metric measures Times Per Week Rob Gets Bored and Buys Coffee. Extrapolation based on Moore's law indicates that I will be forced to open my own coffee shop within three or four upgrade cycles.
So far, phenomenal. Much like durability, this is hard to measure after such a short time, and much like performance this is hard to review in a way that's generally applicable -- that said, I'm impressed. I can't think of any meaningful numbers to quote, but suffice it to say that I don't think Lenovo's claims of all-day computing are that far-fetched.
At the moment I'm running Debian 6.0 (aka "squeeze"). Hardware support is almost flawless, which is impressive, given that the kernel and userland both predate the majority of the major components in the machine. I suspect that a newer distribution (such as the latest version of Fedora or Ubuntu) would not have any of the issues that I encountered. (In other words, unless you plan on running Debian 6.0 or a direct derivative on your T420, ignore this, as you're unlikely to hit these issues).
There were a few issues that are easily solved:
So that's pretty much it. As is the case with most recent ThinkPad hardware, the fact that the T420 is basically an all-Intel platform means that Linux compatibility is quite good.
Who knows. I stopped using Windows in 2004.
I imagine that Windows support is probably pretty good, considering that the notebook shipped with Windows 7 (which I have yet to get a refund for...)
Ok, now you're just messing with me. Seriously though, who runs Solaris on a notebook?
The T420 is one of my favorite ThinkPads so far. It's the first ThinkPad that I've paid full retail price for in quite some time, so as you might imagine I've been trying to view it quite critically... but I simply can't help but like it. It feels more solid than my T410, it has none of the notable flaws of the T410, it looks clean, classy, and expensive, and it performs the tasks that I need it to both quickly and reliably. What more can I ask for in a notebook?
I've been using the T420 as my primary machine for the last several months, and my impression of it hasn't changed. I've used most ThinkPad models made in the last decade or so, and I really think that the T420 is worthy of the name.
With regards to Debian support: the combination of a recent kernel (I'm using a grsecurity-enabled version of 3.0.4 as of this writing) and the updated Xorg packages from squeeze-backports have fixed nearly all of the issues with the GPU. Vsync still doesn't work properly, but with DRI/DRI2 working correctly, Xorg performance is good enough that you don't really notice any tearing unless you're looking for it.
Oh, and MTRR support for Xorg is still broken. There's not much that I can do about that. Xorg's logs don't provide much useful info (aside from letting me know that it doesn't work), and no amount of kernel and /proc trickery (thus far) seems to shut it up. I don't notice any performance issues though, so really this has ended up being more of a nitpick than a legitimate problem.
The text of this review is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. | Last updated 16 Sept 2011