almost bought t420s today, but...

[flensr]

Priced out a nice T420s with the NVS 4200M graphics and i7 cpu, and it fit within my budget. But... The advertised "rapidboot" tech isn't available yet. It uses an SSD in addition to the normal hard drive to decrease boot times to as low as 10 seconds. Seems like a nice option, but it's not available on the t420s. An additional "micro ssd" drive is already available for some other thinkpad models so it looks like I'm just going to have to wait.

Update: I found a short review of the T420s with the i7 cpu and battery life was under 3 hrs looping a movie from the hard drive. Not too good.

I'm going to have to consider switching to the T420 instead of the T420s. Going to have to think hard about this.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

3 hours of video playback is nothing to sneeze at.

 

[flensr]

http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2011/04/16/lenovo-thinkpad-t420s-mini-review.aspx

2 hrs and 15ish minutes on the movie.

I priced out the t420 for about $150 less, with a bigger hard drive and about double the battery life, at a cost of 1lb weight and a bit larger chassis. Still missing is the rapidboot SSD option. The tech specs .pdf file lists a 4GB and 80GB micro SSD, but this isn't mentioned anywhere in the specs of any T420 that can actually be ordered.

I think I'm going to wait a bit longer. It's a shame because I've been ready to buy for over a month now. If they can't get their act together, or the discounts that I'm eligible for now vanish, then I can wait another year until they actually release something that matches the tech specs document... Maybe by then they'll finally offer BD drives, what, a decade after they hit the market?