Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 13: Not your Father's ThinkPad
by Vivek Gowri on April 7, 2010 1:40 AM ESTBattery Life
The ThinkPad Edge offers solid battery life, with nearly eight hours of runtime in our idle battery life test and over six hours in our internet battery benchmark. Unfortunately, this doesn't hold a candle to some of the other CULV notebooks on the market. With the same size 6-cell 5600 mAh, 63 Wh battery, the Acer 1810T gets a full two hours more idle runtime and 84 minutes more in the internet battery benchmark. The same trend holds for the Gateway EC5409c and Dell Inspiron 11z - the Edge simply cannot match their power consumption, even with similar components and an equal battery size.
Curiously, the Edge has better battery life numbers under HD video playback than the other 6-cell CULV offerings, but that could be explained by various differences in screen, hard drive, and memory, as those are the mainly stressed parts of the video benchmarks. The disparity in power consumption and battery life becomes even larger when you compare the Edge to notebooks with 8-cell batteries, like the UL30/80Vt and Alienware M11x. The UL80Vt we tested last year offered significantly better battery life than the Edge in IGP mode, and similar battery life when running on the dedicated NVIDIA G210M graphics card.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
34 Comments
View All Comments
8steve8 - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
This laptop needs a ULV arrandale CPU like the i7-640UM currently in this fujitsu laptop:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Turbo boos on ULV is especially important, the clock rate nearly doubles when thermals allow, under normal usage this will speed you through the rare times CPU is limiting you, at turbo speed and will finish the task before the thermals throttle the frequency.
The keyboard looks perfect, trackpoint is amazingly better than any touchpad, but yes, it needs a better screen and an arrandale.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Unfortunately, that's $1500 for a 2GB, 160GB HDD laptop. Is it faster? Undoubtedly! But it's over twice the cost as well. Ouch!PyroHoltz - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
I agree we NEED new arrandale ULV chips, but that Fugitsu isn't the answer. At 160GB is disk space, thats a waste and who needs an optical drive in an ultramobile...? Give me an 11.6" chassis w/ a 640GB HDD along w/ optimus graphics and 4GB of DDR3 an scratch the i7-640UM for the cheaper i5-520UM. If that notebook is around $700 then I'll get excited.Intel get that damn arrandale ULV chips out to the vendors in mass, this is a joke! The Core 2 CULV chips were great 2 years ago, but we need to move forward. I know plenty of manufacturers have shown their models to carry these chips, MSI x360, Asus' new UL series and HP along w/ Dell all are showing models but nothing is coming because the chips are still delayed!
8steve8 - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
agreed, the fujitsu is just proof that the ULV arrandales are out in some form. and concerning the price, its not like the arrandale is the reason why its $1k more expensive... the cpu is only ~$300PyroHoltz - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Well I'm glad to see someone else knows what these new chips(Arrandale UM) are all about.zeth006 - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Amen to that. Intel's taking its sweet time. Blames a supply shortage for the delay. That's pure incompetence on Intel's part. Even though we're in a recession, a lot of people foresaw the boom we'd experience in laptop sales. Windows 7 only helped catalyze the sales by unleashing the pent up demand!ET - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Still, definitely not my father's Thinkpad. He doesn't have one, and will never have, most likely. Me, I'm just happy thinkpads still have a trackpoint.miniguyverona - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
I've got a couple 13's, to go with 3 macbook pro 13's. The Edge 13 running anything other than the AMD Processors throws the cost/benefit off.Mine are all dual core AMD 1.5GHz, with 4GB, and running Windows 7 you never notice a slowdown with normal apps, You can run full 720p flash apps and minor web gaming. And these cost me around $500 each, which is exactly the same as the Dell and HP Atom machines, and the Edges are significantly, and noticeably, faster. Perception of performance is better, and the Atom machines were running XP, and Edges Windows 7. So it's faster, even when running 1.5 generation newer software.
Belard - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Really... the IdeaPad is line... they are also very good notebooks. And better looking too.And the thing is, Lenovo makes a "thinkpad" Netbook anyways for about $500.
As a ThinkPad owner, I agree the Edge doesn't belong under the ThinkPad name... perhaps as an Ideapad but its in competition with other IdeaPad models. Hmmm... makes me wonder if its an Idea pad under the hood.
pugster - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
I agree. About 3 months ago, my company brought an x200 thinkpad for about $1100. Why? Because of name and service. I really think this is a bad move for Lenovo and put $500 for a thinkpad because of the difference of looks and design compared with the other thinkpads. They should just spend some money promoting their ideapads instead and put the thinkpads name and design in the higher end ones.