Best Ultraportable Laptops

Thin and light laptops with style and performance

Among ultraportables, we've seen some of the best comments for the Lenovo ThinkPad X series laptops, including the Lenovo X200 (Starting at $1,170). This 12.1-inch widescreen laptop draws kudos for its good balance of price and performance. Great battery life is another major plus.

The Lenovo X200, like many ultraportable laptops, lacks an integrated optical drive, so if you need to load or burn CDs and DVDs, you'll have to use an external drive, buy a docking station or use a USB drive instead. Many reviewers note -- and complain about -- the lack of a touch pad (Lenovo includes just mouse buttons and a trackball).

Those quibbles aside, the Lenovo ThinkPad X200 earns Editors' Choice awards at CNET and Laptop Magazine, and PC World rates the X200 a Best Buy as the top ultraportable laptop. Most reviewers test the X200 with its optional 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo processor and come away impressed. PC World tests the X200 with that processor and 2 GB of memory, and says that it finishes not that far behind the fastest notebooks of any size that the magazine has tested. NotebookReview.com bumps up memory to its maximum of 4 GB and speculates that all of the horsepower that the X200 offers when configured that way "might just be overkill for a laptop this size, but the option is there if you're like Tim the Tool Man Taylor and want more power for no other reason than the fact it's more powerful."

Battery life is excellent, all reports say. While a six-cell battery is standard, all reviewers test the X200 with its optional nine-cell battery (which adds $30 to the price). Be aware that the nine-cell battery extends half an inch past the back of the laptop and bumps up the weight to nearly 3.6 pounds, but those inconveniences are worth it for the super long run times delivered. In tests at PCMag.com, the nine-cell battery lasted over six hours between charges.

Both hard drives and solid-state drives are offered as options. The standard hard drive is a 160 GB, 5,400-rpm device, but drives with higher capacities (up to 320 GB) and higher speed (7,200 rpm) are offered as options. Solid-state drives are available in 80 GB (*est. $400) and 128 GB (*est. $450) capacities.

Although basic performance -- including office tasks, web use and watching multimedia -- is excellent, it is much less impressive with graphics-intensive games because of the X200's reliance on integrated graphics. No graphics upgrade options are offered.

Two other versions of the Lenovo ThinkPad X200 are offered. The Lenovo ThinkPad X200s (starting at $1,270) extends the X200's excellent battery life even further by using a lower-powered -- but also slower -- processor and an LED backlit screen. It also drops the laptop's weight by about half a pound. Performance isn't quite as good, but Laptop Magazine says that most won't notice the difference in daily use. Reviewer Michael A. Prospero adds that battery life is extended by about three hours compared with a similarly configured X200. Whether that's worth the difference in cost is something users will need to decide for themselves, Prospero says, though the price gap between the ThinkPad X200 and ThinkPad X200s has closed considerably since that review was written.

The X200 is also available as a convertible/tablet laptop. That will be covered in more depth when we discuss tablet PCs.

The newest members of Sony's Z-series of ultraportable laptops have not been reviewed as of this writing, but some critics and a fair amount of users were well captivated by their immediate predecessors. For example, PCMag.com awards an Editors' Choice to the Sony Vaio VGN-Z590, though the version it reviews is armed -- and priced -- to the teeth with dual 128 GB solid-state drives and a Blu-ray drive. However, reviewer Cisco Cheng says that even the base version "ranks better than the competition."

One of the advantages of these ultraportable laptops is hybrid graphics, which lets the user toggle between Intel integrated graphics (when long battery life is important) and Nvidia discrete graphics (for enhanced rendering and game play) on the fly and without rebooting. At 1.3 inches at its thickest point, the Sony Vaio ultraportable laptop is not quite as thin as some of the competition, but its less-than-3.5-pound weight measures up quite well. High-end features include a 13.1-inch LED backlit screen and a carbon-fiber case. Connectivity is excellent, and includes an HDMI output; wireless options include integrated mobile broadband (Verizon) and Bluetooth. The biggest change between the current versions and its predecessor, it seems, is a step up to a newer and faster 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Three preconfigured Sony Vaio Z systems are available. The base Sony Vaio VGN-Z690 (*Est. $2,280) includes 4 GB of memory, a 320 GB hard drive and a DVD burner. The step-up Sony Vaio VGN-Z691 (*Est. $2,900) adds a writable Blu-ray drive to the mix. The Sony Vaio VGN-Z698 (*Est. $4,400) removes the 320 GB hard drive and replaces it with twin 128 GB solid-state drives (256 GB total storage). You can also custom configure the Sony Vaio VGN-Z690, choosing to upgrade or downgrade -- slower processors, less memory, smaller hard drives and a black non-carbon-fiber case are among the options that can bring costs down to as low as *est. $1,740.

The Samsung X360 also earns some respect with reviewers. The Samsung ultraportable laptop is available in two versions. The Samsung X360-34P (*Est. $2,200) has a 1.4 GHz ultra-low-voltage Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 128 GB solid-state drive. The Samsung X360-34G (*Est. $1,700) has a slightly slower 1.2 GHz processor and a 120 GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive, but is far more affordable. The Samsung X360-34P earns an Editors' Choice recommendation at Laptop Magazine, while the X360-34G earns a spot on the list of recommended ultraportable laptops at About.com. At 2.8 pounds (2.9 pounds for the X360-34G), it is one of the lightest ultraportable laptops around, but at 1.2 inches, it is a bit thicker than some of the competition. While we've not seen benchmark tests for the X360-34G, the Samsung X360-34P stands up well in terms of performance and battery life. Some features, such as an optical drive and integrated mobile broadband support, are missing.