Lenovo today announced new additions to its small business ThinkPad lineup in the form of the 14” screen ThinkPad Edge E431 and 15” screen ThinkPad Edge E531, which update the current E430 and E530 respectively. So what’s new with these updates to the ThinkPad Edge E series? One nice update is the fact the E431 will now be offered with an HD+ resolution touch screen option and the E531 will have a Full HD touch screen option. These higher resolution screens will have a matte finish. Another update is a new port called Lenovo OneLink that will act as a sort of single cable docking connector to allow attachment to a new range of ThinkPad docking stations, the first of which will be called the ThinkPad OneLink Dock.
Outside of these updates the feature set is pretty much in line with the E430 and E530 of old. You can get up to an Intel Core i7 3rd generation processor with the option for dedicated Nvidia graphics. Storage can be configured with up to a 1TB HDD and you can get up to 16GB of RAM. The thickness of the each is around 1-inch thin and there is a built-in optical drive DVD burner on each. The ThinkPad E431 weighs in at 4.7lbs while the E531 weighs 5.4lbs. The default OS is Windows 8 and you get and to support the new features of the OS you get the previously mentioned touchscreen along with an updated 5-button clickpad.
Availability of the E531 and E431 will start in May of 2013 and pricing will start at around $529. The ThinkPad OneLink Dock will be available starting in May also and be priced at $99.
Hey, wait a minute: Where’d the buttons for the Trackpoint go? You mean to tell me the button-free clickpad from the Helix is spilling over to the other Thinkpads? Not cool, Lenovo. Not cool.
Now I have one more reason to no longer care, when a power-efficient Haswell chip finally makes it into the X230T convertible. Mess with the TrackPoint, and I’m history.
I don’t think we’ll see the buttons disappear on the “Enterprise” ThinkPad business models, mostly because businesses aren’t going to move to Windows 8 this year (or the next, or the next possibly). But the reasoning for the integrated trackpoint touchpad buttons is the larger surface area on the touchpad to allow for Windows 8 gestures. I agree that it will be very sad if they remove these on the X series model, as I certainly rely on the dedicated trackpoint buttons.