Lenovo ThinkPad SL510 (2847-22U)

PC World - Lenovo's new SL510 won't surprise anyone who has used a ThinkPad before--it's an excellent laptop that's oriented entirely toward no-nonsense use. The matte black housing, the iconic nub in the middle of the keyboard, and the deep-set keypad are all comfortingly familiar, as are its black, boxy looks, with the familiar "ThinkPad" logo on the top of the case's corner. The machine's lightweight feel is surprising but welcome. It's the return of an efficient, gifted friend--a friend who is now marginally less awkward at social events. And it'll set you back $889 (as of 11/9/2009).

At 15-by-9.7-by-1.4 inches and weighing 5.7 pounds, our review unit was big, but not too bulky. The latchless case opens easily, and the join between screen and laptop feels rock-solid. Our review unit's 15.6-inch screen was matte, not glossy, which means a bit less brightness and color but makes the screen easy to view under just about any lighting you like (a glossy screen is available). The native resolution is just 1366 by 768, but going any higher would have required Lenovo to pack a little more graphics dynamite under the hood.

Our review model's guts include a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 CPU, 3GB of RAM, Intel's integrated 4500 Graphics Media Accelerator, and a 320GB, 7200-rpm hard drive. That was enough to earn a score of 104 in our WorldBench 6 test suite, and is actually fairly fast for an all-purpose laptop. In my own subjective tests, the SL510 easily handles DVD and streaming video playback, but is also meaty enough to deal with 12 tabs of Firefox running while fiddling in Office and Photoshop. However, that anemic GPU means gaming is secondary--hardly a surprise here. (That said, if you need a quick gaming fix, consider Torchlight, which ran swimmingly and is a lot of fun.) As for battery life, the SL510 lasts 5 minutes shy of 4 hours, or about 20 minutes less than the average we've seen from all-purpose-class laptops. So, while it has moxie, keep your charger handy.

The keypad is the fantastic standard that ThinkPad users have used to write so many memos. It's full-size, with plenty of space between individual keys and a fantastic feel on each individual keystroke. The arrow keys and the dedicated Page Up/Page Down keys sit in the lower right as a two-row, three-column bunch with a careful trio of grooves leading the hand from the bottom of the machine to the keys themselves. It's a little thing that makes it very easy to navigate documents and apps without looking down to find keys. The keyboard also features Lenovo's usual spill-resistance technology--it even feels as if you could drop a brick on the keyboard, and it'd be fine.