China-based PC vendor Lenovo has announced a new ultra-thin enterprise notebook – ThinkPad X1, adopting Corning's Gorilla reinforced glass with plastic chassis, in Taiwan.
Gorilla reinforced glass is normally adopted in smartphone products to avoid scratches and is able to shrink down the thickness of the glass to only 0.3mm, less than 0.5mm of standard notebook glass, but the Gorilla reinforced glass is more difficult to produce, and has lower yields.
Most of the vendors have adopted metal chassis for their ultra-thin notebook design due to the material has higher pressure tolerance, which is needed for protection of panel, but the major drawback is the weight of the material. With Gorilla reinforced glass, its toughness allows vendors to adopt a plastic chassis to reduce the machine's weight, while having no risk of damaging the panel, according to sources from PC players.
As for battery, Lenovo adopts Rapid Charge technology to significantly reduce the battery charging time with a speed 2.5-fold faster than previous ThinkPad products, and can charge 80% of the total battery power within 30 minutes, but the drawback of such technology is that users cannot change the battery themselves.