Pros: I bought one of these about a week ago for $399.00 and $12 shipping. For the money, I have not seen anything else that can compare in terms of build-quality and performance. Not too much bloat-ware (thanks Lenovo!). Decent performance from the ultra low voltage processor. Much better than the earlier single core versions and yet, only 10 watts used by the cpu. Awesome battery life, up to 8 hours. The Intel 4500 integrated graphics is adequate for my purposes. In ubuntu 10.10, I was able to enable desktop effects for some cool esthetics with no problem. Not enough graphics power for any demanding 3-D stuff. All the functions I have used in Ubuntu so far have worked without issue. I love the feel of the keyboard. The large multi-touch enabled track-pad is awesome. Despite some errors on Amazon, this unit actually weighs in at only 3.8 lbs, very light on the lap. Build quality is very good. I detect no flex in the body at all. I like the mat-black finish (no finger-prints) and the simplicity of design. It is quite thin, but does not feel fragile. I really like the red L-E-D's on the palm rest and on top of the lid where the "i" in ThinkPad is dotted. It's the little things. :)Cons: The built-in web-cam is only a .3 mega-pixel. Most budget laptops these days are at least 1.3 mega-pixel. I have not yet used the webcam, so cant speak to how well it works at this point. Windows 7 can be a bit sluggish if you are running a virus scan, but otherwise works just fine. There is no CD/DVD drive in this model. I know this in advance, so hesitate to list it as a con. These days, you can use a flash drive to do anything you used to with a CD ROM anyway.
Other thougts: My wife has borrowed this thing from me once and already wants one for herself to replace the Dell Latitude D830 she has been using. I have no complaints at all and would recommend to anyone who needs a lightweight notebook and does not play a lot of 3-D games.
Overall it's great. I do math research and having twin processors is key because I can run some programs for my reseach and it will crunch away in the background on one processor, while I work with other software apps with absolutely no noticable performance hit. (Currently, as I write this, I'm even running two separate jobs -both cpus showing 100% capacity -and yet I can type away in my webbrowser with no time lag between when I hit the keys and the letters appear on the screen.)
I have only one fairly significant complaint about the ergonomics of this laptop. While the "chicklet" style keys are nice and big, the trackpad is TOO big. I never imagined that a large trackpad could cause problems, but it was killing me (before I learned how to disable it completely). I would be typing an email and my palm would inadvertantly hit the track pad and select a bunch of text of the message, and the next letter I typed would replace everything that I had accidentally selected! (Thanks to the web browser's Undo function, I can usually get it all back, but what a nuisance!) I thought maybe I just needed to get used to the large trackpad, and I also tried setting the sensitivity to the lowest possible setting, but it kept causing problems for me. My current solution: I made an alias called "padoff" which I invoke every time I log in. It completely disables the trackpad and I use the pointer instead. I don't really like pointers, but hopefully when I become more skilled at using it, I won't mind so much...
Overall, this is a great, high-quality laptop, and the trackpad issue seems minor when I compare it to my old Asus laptop (the flimsy keyboard of which stopped working after only 3 months!) Finally, I should mention I get great battery life -probably about 3 to 4 hours depending on what I'm using it for. (I just unplugged about a half hour ago and, with two compute-intensive tasks running in the background, the battery meter says I have about 2.5 hours left. That's with the standard battery -not the extended life battery, which I believe is available for this machine at a higher cost.)
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