Lenovo ThinkPad X60s

At $2,299, the Lenovo ThinkPad X60s is not cheap, and it doesn’t have a widescreen LCD or built-in optical drive like some of the other notebooks here. But it does have one thing that four of the five others lack that makes it the ideal companion for road warriors: embedded wireless broadband.

With the EV-DO radio and chipset, you can stay connected at near-broadband speeds in most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. and not have to worry about hunting down a Wi-Fi connection or paying extra at your hotel for broadband. This connectivity advantage, along with its size, ergonomics, and epic battery life, makes the X60s the best ultraportable for business users.

Plenty of other features make this three-pounder a top choice. Flip open the cover of the classic matte black chassis and you'll find the typically excellent ThinkPad keyboard. The letter keys are full-sized and have a comfortable amount of travel. The peripheral keys (Enter, Shift, etc.) are a bit truncated, so touch typists may need to adjust. We appreciate the dedicated volume and mute buttons above the keyboard, which most other makers skip on their ultraportables.

The 12.1-inch display sports a traditional 4:3 aspect ratio. We generally prefer a widescreen, but the extra height a 4:3 display affords is welcome in this class. The screen is bright and crisp, and the 1024 x 768-pixel resolution is comfortable even for aging eyes. Viewing-angle performance side-to-side is fine, but if you can't open the lid all the way, you'll see a pronounced drop-off in screen brightness.

If you want to watch movies on the go or listen to CDs, you can use the external USB-powered optical drive, which adds 0.5 pounds to your load. The other option is the 1.5-pound ThinkPad UltraBase, which houses a full set of connectors and a bay for an optical drive or an additional battery.

On the security front, this ThinkPad has it all. A fingerprint sensor sits on the keyboard deck below the mouse buttons, and the X60s employs TPM architecture to help keep data safe. The shock-mounted 5,400-rpm 80GB hard drive benefits from an active protection system, and the chassis is made of magnesium alloy, lending much more rigidity than a plastic case.

The wireless broadband connectivity from Verizon Wireless is well integrated with the machine's ThinkVantage utilities, which help you manage your wired and wireless connections, back up and restore your system, access tech support, and more. That said, the Access Connections manager could make it easier to connect with EV-DO. As it stands, you have to go through a wizard to set a profile. It isn't hard, but other PC makers handle this function seamlessly in the background as you roam.

Thanks to our model's eight-cell battery (which protrudes from the back of the system about 0.75 inches), the X60s delivered amazing battery life: 8 hours and 42 minutes with Wi-Fi on, and 9 hours and 34 minutes with it off. With its dual-core processor, the Lenovo X60s also topped all others here in MobileMark 2005, showing it will handle all your business apps with aplomb.

Like other business machines, the X60s doesn't come with a ton of third-party software (outside of CD/DVD software). The three-year warranty is a welcome touch. All told, if you need a lightweight machine that doesn't skimp on power, battery life, or connectivity options, the X60s stands above the rest.