While many ultraportable laptops, like the Toshiba R200 go all out to get size and weight to an absolute minimum, a great deal of usability is often sacrificed – the X505 is impractically small for constant daily usage while the R200 has limited battery sizes. The ThinkPad X40 offered an excellent keyboard, decent feature set and superb battery yet stayed small in size and weight making it an ideal all round portable.

Now here’s its successor, the Lenovo X41. Externally, there’s only one real difference: there’s a fingerprint reader just below the mouse buttons. It may seem like a minor step forward, but if you’re rolling out this notebook to a team of users then it means you’ll never need to have that dreaded ‘I forgot my password’ conversation again.

But the main changes have happened beneath the X41’s calm, black exterior. The first item to note is the Sonoma-technology chipset, with Intel’s 915GM Express in place. This brings with it 802.11a/b/g wireless radio.

The processor has also changed. Gone is the X40’s Ultra Low Voltage offering, to be replaced by a ‘mere’ Low Voltage chip. The 1.5GHz Pentium M 758 certainly delivers in terms of performance. Quite apart from the impressive benchmarks, it feels sprightly in day-to-day use - both on the mains and off.

We expected the 915GM chipset and higher-voltage processor to affect this notebook’s battery life, and to a certain extent it did. Whereas the extended-life eight-cell battery kept the X40 going for over seven hours in our light-use tests, the X41 lasted for six hours, 48 minutes.

The eight-cell battery comes as standard when using the product code 25256NM and we don’t recommend saving money by opting for the four-cell version. The X41 is designed to be used on the move, and the standard battery will last for only about two-and-a-half hours under light use (unfortunately, IBM was unable to supply us with a four-cell battery for this test, so we don’t have exact figures).

The configuration we tested included the handy X4 UltraBase docking station ($299 extra), complete with a DVD-ROM/CDRW combo drive ($239). The X4 adds parallel, serial and PS/2 ports, none of which are included on the X41, and also provides three USB 2 ports.

Aside from the lack of legacy ports, the X41 is well connected. Along with a single Type II PC Card slot, 56K modem, Gigabit Ethernet, VGA out, plus headphone and microphone sockets, there are two USB 2 ports, infrared and Bluetooth.

There’s one other change since the release of the X40: this is now an ‘IBM’ ThinkPad in name only. Chinese computing giant Lenovo now owns what was IBM’s personal computer group. This raises questions over whether the level of customer support and build quality ThinkPad owners have become used to will continue – bear in mind that IBM has won awards for its notebooks’ reliability, service and support.

Fortunately, all the signs so far are positive. The ThinkPad division of IBM has been very autonomous for years, and in reality it seems to have made little difference whether it’s reporting to IBM or Lenovo. Build quality is to the same exacting standard, if not better: the lid of the X41 is actually stronger than that of the X40.

We were also pleased to see that the screen is a little brighter than before, while the keyboard retains the trademark ThinkPad quality – you simply won’t find a better keyboard on an ultraportable, with a great feel combined with large, well proportioned keys.

There are some software tweaks as well. Press the blue Access IBM button and you’ll see an explanation page about your new purchase – not generic to ThinkPads, but customised to the X41 – and which also provides a shortcut to its Protect & Recover feature. This not only allows you to back up data, but provides an easy way to recover the system to its original factory state – the only downside is that this disk image consumes disk space, with 51.9GB left from 60GB.