The Lenovo ThinkPad X130e laptop is specifically designed for Elementary aged children and is equipped with the technology needed for an educational laptop. That said, the X130e may appeal to some business buyers or home users. It’s a small and portable laptop with a rugged build, comfortable keyboard and budget friendly price. All characteristics that might appeal to a crowd other than 8 year olds. When purchasing the X130e you have a choice of an Intel Core i3 or AMD Fusion E300 series processor. The Intel processor is better performing, but also costs around $100 more. Pricing on the ThinkPad X130e AMD model starts at $469 while the Intel model currently starts at $589.
The ThinkPad X130e we have under review is the base AMD model with the following specs:
- Processor: AMD Fusion E300 1.30GHz
- OS: Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
- Memory: 4 GB DDR3 – 1333MHz (1 DIMM)
- Screen: 11.6″ HD LED 1366 x 768 resolution
- Weight: 3.9 lb (1.78kg)
- Wireless: 802.11 Wi-Fi
- Storage: 250GB HD
- Ports: VGA, HDMI 1.4, Gigabit Ethernet, Mic (microphone)/speaker combo jack, 3 USB 2.0 (including 1 powered USB), 4-in-1 media card reader (SD/SDHC/SDXC/MMC)
- Weight: 3.93 lbs
- Warranty: 1-year
At the time of purchase this configuration cost $429 via Lenovo.com.
ThinkPad X130e Video Overview
For those who don’t like to read dense text, here’s a quick video overview of the X130e I did:
Design and Build
The ThinkPad X130e can be considered a derivation of the X120e, I like to think of it as an armored version of the X120. Here are the important ruggedized improvements the X130e offers over the X120e:
- A top cover rubber bumper to absorb impacts to the side of the laptop
- 33% stronger corner to reduce the chance of damage when dropped at an angle
- Stronger reinforced hinges, tested to last up to 30,000 opening and closings
- Reinforced and recessed ports to decrease the effects of wear and tear
- Stronger Bezel (area around the laptop screen) with 1.2mm thick plastic to protect the LED panel
All that reinforcement is designed to make sure kids using these in school don’t break the equipment easily and create a hardware support headache. The rounded off front corners also help to prevent young ones from injuring themselves on any sharp corners. The difference in build quality over the X120e is substantial. The hinges absolutely feel more rigid and are as stiff as those on the ThinkPad X220 I own. The lid feels so thick it could take a bullet, no amount of pushing or knocking is able to cause ripples in the LCD screen, a sure sign there’s some thick protection in place. The rubber bumper lip around the lid is substantial enough that you could put wheels on the X130e and play bumper cars with other X130e’s in the room. Even the rubber bumper feet on the X130e are thicker than normal, dropping the X130e onto the table from a height of around 1” provides a fun bounce, not a clunk of plastic on wood. There is no doubt this is the most rugged and durable $400 laptop on the market.
From an aesthetic design perspective the X130e looks a lot like any other ThinkPad — it’s all black, has a red trackpoint, a ThinkPad logo, matte screen and a case made of hard durable plastics. A couple of differences to the Enterprise targeted ThinkPads such as the X220 is the chiclet style keyboard and a blinking red “i” on the ThinkPad logo on the lid and right palm rest. Those design touches are borrowed from the ThinkPad Edge line.
One interesting note in terms of design of the body is that the battery actually plays a role in the overall structure of the laptop, take the battery out and you have a gaping hole in the X130e at the top of the keyboard:
If you use the machine plugged in and with the battery removed it could be a fun place to store pens and knick knacks, the screen uses a drop hinge design so it’s a nice little enclosed space back there when the screen is open!
Screen
The X130e has an 11.6” screen with 1366 x 768 resolution. The screen layer finish is matte so to avoid reflection and glare. The screen sports 200 nits of brightness, that’s not very bright but adequate for indoor use though certainly nowhere near bright enough for outdoor usage. At the top of the screen is a built-in web camera with a rather low 0.3-megapixel resolution. The camera does offer low light sensitivity, which is generally more useful than more megapixels. Kids in class will now be able to interact with other students around the world if teachers allow such things, or use Skype to call home and let mom know they forgot to bring lunch.
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As far as screen viewing quality, there’s nothing exceptional here. The screen seemed a little grainy to my eyes, but colors were fairly accurate. The screen viewing angles were typical for a TN panel technology display, you’d have to pay much more for a laptop to get a higher quality IPS display with wide viewing angles and more accurate color representation.
For kids, the X130e display is just fine. If you’re extremely picky about screens you need to be spending more money, you won’t find a premium screen in this buying category.
Keyboard and Touchpad
It would of course be criminal to sell a ThinkPad without a top notch keyboard and trackpoint so you already know that the X130e is going to have one of the best keyboards in its size class. Which it does. The X130e has a chiclet style design, but still manages to stay close in feel to other ThinkPad notebooks. The X130e keyboard doesn’t have quite the same stiffness and firmness of press the keys as on the X220 I use, they’re a little lighter to the touch. Traditional ThinkPad typists will certainly notice this keyboard is different, and maybe not up to snuff, but it’s certainly a better keyboard than any other 11” laptop I’ve used. The Delete and Backspace keys have increased in size from the X120e, which is a user friendly touch, even us non-students make a lot of typing mistakes and have to correct ourselves.
The touchpad on the X130e is also different to the X120e. Instead of using dedicated lower mouse buttons they have now been integrated into the touchpad, the same way they are on the X220. The touchpad has a textured surface so it’s easy to feel without having to look down. Because the touchpad is so small you tend to run out of room to move the cursor around and make scrolling or zooming gestures. The trackpoint supplants anything you would use the touchpad for and is easy and more efficient to use, whether kids will master using a trackpoint is questionable. An external mouse is probably the most intuitive and easy to use thing for the elementary aged crowd.
Performance
I know when I used to use a computer in school the only concern was how well it ran Lemonade Stand, Oregon Trail or Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? But back then each room got one computer and not one laptop per child as I guess is the standard being pushed for today. However, one thing that hasn’t changed is kids will (or should) be using computers for educational means, and the standard productivity program or educational games a 4th grader will use doesn’t require much performance. The AMD E-300 1.30GHz processor on board this X130e is certainly not a performance beast, it’s a low voltage processor and doesn’t create much heat, meaning it’s battery life friendly. If you’re an educator using laptops in a classroom then battery life is more important than extra performance, you can’t have 30 kids all plug-in to an outlet, a laptop needs to potentially last an entire class day to avoid the hassle of plugging in. And so the AMD E-300 processor makes sense, it allows the X130e to achieve battery life levels of just over 7 hours and has enough performance for web browsing, watching videos, playing educational games, email, or taking online practice tests. And it has enough power for using the HDMI port to output video to TV to watch movies on a larger screen after school work is done.
With that said, what’s a review without benchmarks? Here’s how the ThinkPad X130e scored on PCMark Vantage and its score relative to other laptops:
| Laptop | PCMark Vantage Score |
| Lenovo ThinkPad X130e (AMD E-300 1.30GHz, AMD 6130, 4GB RAM, 5400 RPM HD) | 1,981 PCMarks |
| HP Folio 13 (Intel Core i5-2467M 1.60GHz, Intel HD3000, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD) | 9,026 PCMarks |
| Sony VAIO SA (Intel Core i5-2430M 2.50GHz, AMD Radeon 6630M, 4GB RAM) | 7,007 PCMarks |
| Dell Vostro 1440 Review (Intel Core i3-370M, Intel HD, 6GB RAM) | 4,931 PCMarks |
| Lenovo IdeaPad Y470 – Intel Core i7-2630qm, Nvidia 550M 1GB, 8GB RAM, Intel SSD | 12,160 PCMarks |
| Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E420 – Intel Core i5-2410m 2.30GHz, 4GB RAM | 6,056 PCMarks |
| Dell Vostro 3450 – Intel Core i5-2410m 2.30Ghz, 4GB RAM | 5,901 PCMarks |
| Dell Inspiron N411z – Intel Core i3-2330m 2.30GHz, 4GB RAM | 5,285 PCMarks |
| Lenovo ThinkPad T420 – Intel Core i3-2310m 2.1GHz, 2GB RAM | 3,204 PCMarks |
As you can see, compared to more powerful laptops with an Intel Core i3 processor or above the overall system performance falls far short.
How about a comparison to the X120e? Running PCMark 7 yielded a score of 856 on the AMD E-300 equipped X130e and 874 on the AMD E-350 equipped X120e:
| Laptop | PCMark 7 | |
| Lenovo ThinkPad X130e (AMD E-300 1.30GHz, AMD 6130, 4GB RAM, 5400 RPM HD) | 856 |  |
| Lenovo ThinkPad X120e (AMD E-350 1.60GHz, AMD 6130, 4GB RAM, 5400 RPM HD) | 874 |  |
Specs wise at the base configuration the X130e is fairly similar to the previous X120e offering either an AMD E-300 1.3GHz processor in the X130e or E-350 1.6GHz processor in the X120e. Graphics are served by the same AMD HD 6310 in each, a hard drive is standard for storage and you can configure memory up to 8GB. In terms of perceived performance, the X120e and X130e aren’t going to be noticeably different, even though the X120e with its base configuration E-350 processor does get slightly higher benchmark scores.
Weight
The X130e is unsurprisingly quite a bit heavier than the X120e due to all the extra armor protection it has on. The X120e weighed in at 3.28lbs while the X130e weighs 3.82lbs according to the scales I have on hand. That’s a half pound difference, and certainly you can feel that if you pick it up with one hand.
 ThinkPad X130e 3.82lbs |
 ThinkPad X120e 3.28lbs |
The ThinkPad X130e can be carried with one hand if you’re an adult, but it’s definitely not a good idea for a kid to carry this with one hand.
Ports
The X130e comes with a nice selection of ports for this sized laptop. It even has an HDMI port, not necessarily something you’d expect in a laptop targeted at academia.
On the right side you get the 4-in-1 media card reader, powered USB 2.0 port, regular USB 2.0 port, power jack:
On the left side you get a VGA monitor out port, HDMI port, USB 2.0, Ethernet jack and microphone / headphone combo jack:
On the front side there are no ports, the speakers are located on the underside of the front:
On the back there are no ports, just the area where the battery can slide in:
Heat & Noise
One thing the X130e with the AMD E-300 processor does really well with is staying cool and quiet. Even when running benchmarks the X130e was fan was virtually inaudible in a room with ambient noise and heat is just not an issue, everywhere on the laptop surface stays cool under any usage scenario. The laptop did get warm on the bottom when running demanding benchmark applications, but nothing terrible and under regular usage the bottom stayed just luke warm.
Battery Life
Lenovo claims up to 8.5 hours of battery life on the X130e. That’s probably achievable if you dim the screen all the way down and take some other battery saving measures such as turning off wireless. Under a more realistic usage scenario with screen brightness set to medium, wireless on and the power setting set to the Windows “Balanced” mode battery life was right around the 7 hour mark. That’s enough to get you through a day of classes, or if you’re a business person that will see you through a New York to San Francisco flight.
Conclusion
The ThinkPad X130e is an interesting little laptop, it certainly fits well as a computer for kids in the elementary school age group due to its durable design, nice keyboard and battery life long enough to last a school day. The X130e performance is so-so with the AMD E-300, it’s well suited for everyday work tasks but beyond that you’re going to be limited in the applications it can run well. It is noticeably slow relative to say an Intel Core i5 desktop replacement style laptop. If you’re looking for a small laptop that’s very durable, has a nice keyboard and is budget friendly at under $500 then you’ve found the huckleberry you’ve been looking for right here with the X130e.
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Where to Buy
Stupid Why not AMD E2 3000m processor. E-300 2 years old now. Already upgraded with turbo E2 processors. It is the only real competitor to Intel i3 processors.
Lenovo should listen the engineers.
I don’t think there are any E2 based notebooks out there yet. The desktop E2′s are based on Llano.