Lenovo introduced some significant chassis changes with the ThinkPad X240, so the modifications are pretty subtle this year: The design of the matte gray X250 is almost completely identical to the predecessor; the minor differences in terms of weight (1.43 kg) and height (20.3 mm) are negligible. The rivals from Dell (1.5 kg, 19.4 mm) and HP (1.52 kg, 21 mm) are very similar.

Lenovo uses a glass-fiber reinforced plastic chassis with an integrated magnesium frame to ensure a sufficient stability despite the low weight. An effort that paid off: Except for some small areas, for example, the slightly flexible area above the keyboard, the chassis leaves a very sturdy impression. The X250 was also tested according to military standards including the resistance against vibrations, humidity, dust and temperature changes – even though the notebook will hardly face those kinds of stresses in practice it is certainly reassuring in respect of the product quality.

The lid cannot quite keep up with the stiffness of the base unit and slightly twists under moderate pressure. Still, this issue is not really a cause for concern, especially since a certain amount of flexibility can even protect against serious damages in some cases – a crack, for example. The panel is once again held by massive metal hinges that hardly bounce during vibrations and allow a maximum opening angle of up to 180 degrees.

All things considered, the best description for the case is probably "functional" – not the design but the function and the ergonomics were more important during the development.

Both the Gigabit-LAN (Intel I218-LM) as well as the wireless adaptor (Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265) of the X250 are provided by Intel and are among the best products you can currently get in this segment. The wireless module was introduced together with Broadwell and supports all current WLAN standards in 2.4 as well as 5 GHz networks (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac) besides Bluetooth 4.0. We were able to determine excellent transfer rates of around 40 up to 45 MB/s in our test – you obviously do not only need a corresponding dual-stream 802.11 ac router like our TP-Link Archer C7, but also a suitable environment for these results. The performance is reduced at longer distances, but the overall signal quality is still above average.

We are almost used to a disappointing webcam: The 0.9 MP sensor takes noisy pictures with pale colors. The quality might be sufficient for video chats, but you should not expect decent snapshots or video clips. Lenovo at least integrated a very decent array microphone, which means you usually do not need an external headset.

Security 

The X250 is a real ThinkPad and is therefore equipped with several administrative and security features like TPM, SmartCard reader, fingerprint reader and vPro support (depends on the CPU). BIOS and hard drive can be protected with a password and the notebook also supports Anti-Theft/Computrace – even though this requires an additional service contract (additional charge).

Accessories

We got used to the fact that many manufacturers do not ship many accessories, but we have to criticize that Lenovo does not even put a driver CD or a better solution like a USB stick in the box, especially when you consider the price. Still, all the necessary files can easily be found on Lenovo’s Support website, so the installation of an operating system – in our case Windows 7 Professional 64-bit – is quick and painless.

Maintenance

It is a good idea to have a look at the provided Hardware Maintenance Manual, which describes all procedures, before you clean the fan or upgrade the device. This is the short version: After the removal of 8 screws you have to carefully lift the bottom cover, which is also secured by some clips. After that you have access to the internal 24 Wh battery, the 2.5-inch drive (supports drives with a height of up to 9.5 millimeters), the WLAN adaptor as well as the only memory module. The free M.2 slot for the WWAN card (antenna cables already installed) can also be equipped with a second SSD.

Warranty

Lenovo grants a warranty of 36 months – longer runtimes and additional services like on-site repairs or accidental protection are available for an additional charge. The exact offers and prices are available on the website of the manufacturer after you entered your serial number; an upgrade to five years would cost at least 168 Euros (~$191) for our review unit.

Potential buyers of the X250 can choose between five different 12.5-inch displays: The least expensive solution is a TN panel with the WXGA resolution (200 cd/m², 300:1), followed by an IPS panel with 1366x768 pixels (300 cd/m², 700:1), which is also available in combination with a touchscreen (270 cd/m², 700:1). The two Full HD versions use the superior IPS technology and are available with (360 cd/m², 700:1) or without a touchscreen (400 cd/m², 700:1).

Our review unit is equipped with the matte non-touch panel with 1920x1080 pixels and 176 ppi. We measure 357 cd/m² and therefore cannot confirm the advertised maximum brightness, but the backlight is still way too bright for indoor environments and has to be dimmed – if necessary down to just 4 cd/m² (no visible PWM flickering). Despite the mediocre brightness distribution of just 81%, the picture is subjectively very even and you can hardly see any screen bleeding even with completely dark picture content.

The IPS panel from the manufacturer LG supports its excellent quality with a contrast ratio of 902:1 and the advantages compared to a cheap TN panel are visible right away: The picture looks more vivid and both the black value and the colors appear richer. Not only pictures and videos benefit from that, you will appreciate the great display during office tasks as well. However: Other manufacturers also offer comparable panels.

The small display size of the X250 is not perfect for PhotoShop or similar applications, but the ThinkPad is more than sufficient for the occasional editing of holiday pictures. Colors (DeltaE 4.2) and the grayscale (DeltaE 3.1) already show pretty low deviations out of the box and the situation can be further improved with a calibration. The limited color-space coverage (42% AdobeRGB, 66% sRGB - (Correction 20.5.2015 due to a wrong sRGB-reference-profile)) for blue and magenta colors in particular, unfortunately, prevents even better results.

Not only high contrasts and rich colors are advantages of IPS panels – the superior viewing-angle stability justifies the additional charge over other display technologies as well. It does not matter from which side you look at the display of the ThinkPad: The picture quality hardly changes even with very big deviations from the center. Only the view from an angle above results in a visible deterioration of the black value.

The Core i7-5600U is currently the fastest chip with a TDP of 15 Watts. The high nominal clock of 2.6 GHz for the dual-core processor surpasses the previous high-end chip Core i7-4600U (Haswell) by 500 MHz, which is pretty remarkable. It is, however, interesting that the maximum Turbo clock was lowered by 100 MHz to 3.2 GHz. This difference should be compensated for by the higher per-MHz performance of the Broadwell architecture. We collected all the information about the new 14 nm generation in our CPU database and a separate architecture article.

The integrated graphics solution with the designation HD Graphics 5500 was reworked as well and now has 24 Execution Units (HD 4400: 20 EUs) that run with 300 up to 950 MHz. It is also the first time that an Intel GPU supports DirectX 11.2 – a feature that has already been supported by several AMD and Nvidia chips for a while now.

Lenovo only integrated one memory slot, which means the existing 8 GB DDR3L-1600 RAM are also the maximum equipment. Also annoying: This means the memory can only work in a slow single-channel configuration, which affects the graphics performance significantly. The storage solution is a 2.5-inch SSD with a capacity of 360 GB.