ThinkPad Edge E220s and Edge 420s Review + Specifications & Price

New ThinkPad Edge 2011 Models Review. Lenovo has announced additions to its wildly successful ThinkPad Edge brand today with 4 new additions to the range. The first two, the ThinkPad edge E220s and the ThinkPad edge E420s are ‘premium’ models designed to take the ThinkPad Edge brand upmarket.

<— Check all the latest Lenovo offers and ThinkPad Edge Coupon Code

The ThinkPad Edge E220s and E420s are specifically targeted as hybrid laptops for the Soloprenuer and Small Business owner who wants to use the same ThinkPad for work and play!

Lenovo calls the new premium look ‘jaw-dropping’ and from the images we have seen up to now, that certainly looks to be the case. As soon as we get hands on at CES we will let you know what we think! The new ThinkPad Edge E220s and E420s certainly look stunning with the infinity screen, a soft touch matte finish and metal accents that are a far cry from the classic ThinkPad look and take a step up from the ThinkPad edge notebooks we saw launched a year ago.

The ThinkPad E220s and E420s will feature the new enhanced second gen Intel® Core™ ‘Sandy Bridge’ mobile architecture which should vastly improve both processing and graphics performance.

It looks like the people in charge of design for the ThinkPad brand are taking a step back and taking a close look at what today’s ‘prosumer’ is looking for in a notebook. Peter Hortensius, Senior Vice President of the Think Product Group for Lenovo said “How we think about PC design and the entire computing experience is changing,” and Peter goes on to comment, “The new ThinkPad Edge premium laptops give users technology that is extremely personal, beautiful and powerful so they can accomplish their business goals and keep up with their personal lives.”

Eye-Catching Design, Intriguing looks

The new ThinkPad Edge models are certainly chic, with a modern clean look, Lenovo has designed the 12.5-inch E220s and 14-inch E420s to be real head turners. Incredibly thin and light, the E220s measures under 1” thick and weighs less than 3.5 pounds for outstanding portability. The E420s is a little larger at just one-inch and weighing in at 4lbs. Both the ThinkPad Edge E220s and the ThinkPad Edge E420s feature metal accents that frame the black, soft-matte cover exterior.

The infinity display has been designed to give a TV-like viewing appearance while you’re watching movies and streaming TV’s shows and the ThinkPad island style keyboard introduced at the January 2010 CES has been improved yet again in the new models. This is a truly outstanding keyboard and provides the same exceptional typing experience the ThinkPad classic range is famous for. The palm rest features a large responsive mousepad with red accents on the left and right mouse buttons which will please ThinkPad traditionalists!

ThinkPad Edge Design Video

The keyboard is also spill resistant and for those of you who need to play your DVD collection the ThinkPad E420s has a concealed slim line slot-loading DVD writer. Premium sound is provided with Dolby Home Theatre® audio along with high definition video conferencing.

Outstanding Performance and fast boot times

Lenovo released its latest version of ‘Enhanced Experience’ or EE 2.0. With EE 2.0, Lenovo has optimized the preload sequence with drivers and BIOS all tuned for speedy start up. EE 2.0 has been combined with Rapid Drive technology which takes advantage of an SSD for faster boot speed. Instead of relying purely on SSD technology for storage, Lenovo has combined the best of spinning Hard Drive technology to take advantage of the larger storage capacity, and hybridized that with a small SSD drive which will handle the initial boot sequence and program loading for the fastest possible boot times.

The new ThinkPad Edge E220s and ThinkPad Edge E420s can be specified with the range of second generation Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors which take advantage of Intel’s new Sandy Bridge Mobile architecture.

Sandy Bridge promises some outstanding performance gains for the new ThinkPad Edge models. The mobile Sandy Bridge platform is differentiated by the number of Cores in the naming convection with ‘M’ being the mobile Dual Core, QM being the Mobile Quad Core and XM the Extreme version.

The new processors start out at with the Core i5 2520M which runs at 2.5GHz with 3MB of L3 cache and supports DDR3-1333. The Quads start at the Core i7 2720QM running at 2.2GHz with 6MB L3 cache, runs 12 threads and supports DDR3-1600. The new Sandy Bridge Mobile Processors top out at the Core i7 2920XM running at 2.5GHz, 8MB of L3 Cache and support for DDR3-1600

All mobile Sandy Bridge chips are blessed with two graphics cores (12 EUs), so other than for high end gaming, you will probably eliminate the need for a separate Graphics chip. We should see a pretty spectacular increase in Graphics and GPU performance overall. If we get NVIDIA’s Optimus Graphics on the new ThinkPad Edge,we should finally be able to do some serious gaming. Even without Optimus however, the new dual graphics cores will improve gaming performance other than real high end stuff.

There’s more!

All of the new Edge models will feature the latest wireless connectivity technologies: WiFi and optional mobile broadband and 4G/WiMAX.

You’ll love the sound quality from the Dolby Home Theatre® audio. Clear, crisp Dolby certified audio will ensure that you enjoy your music and movies. Both models in the new ThinkPad Edge range are equipped with Lenovo’s enhanced video conferencing capabilities, including a high definition Web Camera, noise-cancelling keyboard software and high performance microphones and speakers. Like to stream Hulu or Netflix programming to your TV? The Edge E220s and E420s have an HDMI port so that you can connect to you flat-screen TV and watch in comfort.

More ThinkPad Edge Choices

Along with the ThinkPad edge E220s and E420s Lenovo has also announced the ThinkPad Edge E420 and E520 laptops for Soloprenuer’s and small business owners who need the class leading features of a business grade laptop but don’t necessarily need the premium finish and features that the ‘S’ models will offer. The new the ThinkPad Edge E420 and ThinkPad Edge E520 will also feature the new Intel® Core™ ‘Sandy Bridge’ mobile platform together with Lenovo Enhanced Experience 2.0 with Rapid Drive on select models.

So when do we get them Lenovo?

The ThinkPad Edge E220s and E420s will be available beginning in April and prices in the US will start at approximately $899 for the Edge 220s and $749 for The ThinkPad Edge 420s. The ThinkPad Edge E420 and E520 will be available beginning in April with models starting from approximately $599.

Watch out for a detailed ThinkPad E220s review and ThinkPad E420s review in a few weeks time. We will also let you have a full ThinkPad E440 review and a ThinkPad E520 review at the same time. We can’t wait to get our hands on them!

Check all the latest Lenovo offers and ThinkPad Edge Coupon Code