My experience and thoughts of the Lenovo T440s Ultrabook.
A high class lady for the professional.
About me
The name is Kim and I’ve been a tech lover whole my life. My interest was sparked, when my father brought home our first PC back in the 90´s and since then I’ve suffered from the cravings of tech and gadgets. From the early teen gaming years and now into the serious use of online business and retail. Currently employed as a one man IT army. Managing and developing any and everything in our 6 retail stores and online store.
The review
I received this little beauty for review right in the middle of relaunching our online stores, so what better time to give it a run for its money. My normal mobile workhorse being a Lenovo W530 workstation, the T440s would have quite the shoes to fill.
So let’s kick this off with some nice first impressions.
First Impressions
The machine came packaged in a well protected box like you would expect with a Lenovo product.
First impressions when opening the box were good, out came a sleek Ultrabook made of carbon fibre and magnesium with a matte business black finish. Looks like a real business machine should. Opening the lid I was met by a classic ThinkPad quality keyboard with the iconic red TrackPoint rubber dot in the middle. A touchpad in the middle of the handrest, and on the right side the fingerprint reader.
The keyboard works very well, has a nice semi smooth surface and the keys responds nicely without being mushy. Both the handrest and keyboard has the same nice smooth rubber feel to it. My fingers never slipped around on this, which I apparently needed. Seeing as the T440s is so light, it quickly became second nature to just handle it with one hand, reaching for it on the desk or from the sofa. On a side note the keyboard comes with a cool backlighting feature which is easily turned on by the press of the Fn+spacebar. Comes in quite handy in low light situation, like late night working on the sofa or under a table rewiring.
The T440s came with windows 8 pro preinstalled, so all I had to do was boot up and go through the motions of setting up windows, running the usual updates and install my favorite programs. All this is normally a quick thing to do, thou for me it took a little while longer than usual. Not the machines fault, but rather my inexperience with windows 8. I could of course have installed Win 7 on it, but It became a bit of a mission for me, to not only put the T440s through its paces but also to force myself to get to know windows 8. Being a very happy windows 7 Pro business user, the ui of Win 8 has never felt quite right for me. And in my mind is more of a gimmick than actually useful. Using the machine it became clear that some of these preservations were indeed warranted, when I tried to use it as a replacement for my Lenovo w530 or desktop machine.
So I shifted gears, and with that in mind decided to put away my Lenovo Edge 15 which I’ve used primarily for travel and times when I need a smaller more lightweight machine with a good balance of computing power vs battery life. And this was where the going got good for me. The machine is an absolute joy to use for computing on the go. Its light weight and thin profile makes it fit on any small tray table and easy to work with on your lap. The battery life is excellent, and the combination of a built in and hot swappable battery is great. Also fast charging times made this a perfect fit for my out of office use. Windows 8 did prove somewhat of a challenge, but I’m getting more and more comfortable with it every day. One that I still struggle with is the touchpad though, it will take some time getting used to using all the swipes, swirps and slides, that give you extra speed. But the mouse pad is nice and smooth with fast responses to my commands. Performance wise there is no lack of power, it boots up crazy fast and is ready to work in no time. Launching programs is almost immediately and it plows through everyday tasks like a pro.
All in all a highclass lady in professional clothing. Perfect for the travelling businessman, the conduit crawling admin, students and just about everyone else who wants a durable and fast ultrabook.
Specifications
| CPU | Intel Core i5-4300U 1.9 – 2.5GHz |
| Memory | 4 GB DDR3 1600MHz |
| Graphics card | Intel HD Graphics HD4400 |
| Storage | 128GB SSD Toshiba THNSNHxxxGCST |
| Display | 14.1” FHD IPS 1920x1080 wide viewing angle |
| Webcam | 720p HD |
| Batteries | * Front battery: 3-cell Li-Polymer 23.2 Whr * Rear battery: 3-cell Li-Polymer 23.2 Whr |
| Security | Fingerprint reader & secure chip |
| Connections | * 3 USB 3.0 ports * 1 VGA Port * 1 Mini Display Port * 1 Gigabit Ethernet Port * 1 SD Card Reader |