Lenovo X100e Power Consumption, X100e UK Review
Over the years I've had both an IBM X30 and X40 Thinkpad, justly famed for their build quality and usability but small and light size. Before netbooks, the X-Series was the only 12" notebook around but that portability (and the enteprise spec within) came at a high price. The X301 (Macbook Air slimness but with an optical drive - watch their cheeky ad here) retails at £1847.
The X100e instead features a similar chassis and display, with an excellent keyboard and pointing stick, but with "netbook" internals. So instead of a Core 2 Duo there's AMD's Neo MV-40 (inexpensive like the Intel Atom but a bit better performing) and the Ati 3200 onboard graphics we have come across and used in Jetway mini-itx motherboards. Supposedly it will drive older games like Half Life 2 at a playable frame-rate but I've been unable to get Big Buck Bunny running at 1080p at least as an h.264 nor will YouTube play at 720p (even with Adobe Flash 10.1 installed for both IE and Chrome). For now I will chalk this up to user error, at least until I install Ubuntu on it using these steps, an OS I am more comfortable with.
Most netbooks have a glossy finish (fingerprint magnet) and glossy display (useless except for seeing your reflection). The X100e has a glorious matte finish throughout and a bright 1366 x 768 11.6" display, it's best feature.
There are better and more thorough reviews online, specifically this one:
http://netbooked.net/netbook-reviews/review/lenovo-thinkpad-x100e-review/
So I'm going to stop giving a general review and focus on power consumption as no one else has and it's important to really establish how netbooks stack up with nettops like Aleutia T1s.
Running off the battery, without cranking down processor and with screen at full brightness (15 on scale of 1-15) it uses 25W. But that's not with the CPU maxed out encoding a movie, but just with Chrome in background and using the Snipping tool:
Keep the brightness high but max out all the power-saving features (i.e. crank CPU down) and you're at 20W.
