I've been driving the Lenovo X301 for about a month now. A few impressions:
- SSDs are incredible. I will (probably) never ever buy a laptop with a traditional hard drive. The speed and quiet are just phenomenal. Extra capacity (128GB in all) was worth the extra cost.
- Lack of smartcard and flash reader is more aggravating than I originally expected. It's baffling that they included an optical drive but neither of these (nor any ExpressCard slots).
- ...which brings me to the second battery, which I've got stuffed into that optical bay. Lenovo's firmware doesn't deal with second batteries very well. Essentially, it always cycles the second battery, which means I'm burning through life on that one without ever really touching the primary. This would make sense if the second were easily removable, but (a) it's actually screwed into the case, and (b) even if it popped out, I wouldn't remove it anyway. It would be great if there were a way to balance the cycles between the two batteries, but even the surprisingly configurable Lenovo power software doesn't let you tweak that.
- The keyboard is really great. It's got a slightly lighter touch than the old ThinkPads, which is nice.
Even with its faults, this is the best laptop I've driven so far.
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