Lenovo’s new X1 laptop can survive drops, spills, you dancing on it

We highly doubt that you’ll use your laptop as a dancing mat, but if you were so inclined, the Lenovo X1 is one laptop that shouldn’t have a problem surviving.

Launched this week, the X1 is aimed at business-minded folk, but we can easily see anyone after a thin and durable computer plonking cash down on the $1949 price tag.

Weighing just under 1.7kg, the 13-inch Lenovo X1 packs in a fast Sandy Bridge 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 processor, either a hard drive or solid state drive, up to 8GB of memory, a USB 3.0 port, 3G SIM card slot, HDMI output, and a new recharge system capable of bringing a battery back to 80% capacity in 30 minutes.

Most importantly, Lenovo has made this laptop to be tough. We’re led to believe that some business-people aren’t the nicest to their computers and that broken laptops are fairly common, which is where this model comes in.

Notebooks such as Apple’s MacBook Air and Samsung’s Series 9 might use metals such as aluminium and duralumin, but Lenovo’s X1 combines a magnesium chassis, Gorilla Glass protected screen, and spill-resistant LED backlit keyboard in a 21.3mm thick computer (or 16mm when the computer is open and screen is viewable).

Aside for the video above where one of Lenovo’s own drops an X1 for our amusement, we’ve seen water poured onto the keyboard, the X1’s screen prodded with a fork, and someone else stand on the laptop. Each time, the computer came out unscathed.

Pretty impressive, and although we don’t recommend dropping it or doing all of these nasty things to any computer (we felt really bad about dropping one of the test units), one Lenovo executive even suggested dancing on the laptop was possible.

We just wouldn’t recommend it.

In fact, talking with Lenovo about the warranty of the X1 suggests that while the computer is more likely to survive drops and spills than another laptop, if the X1 is broken because of these accidents, Lenovo won’t cover the repairs under warranty.

Fair enough. We’ll try not to drop our laptops if you don’t.

The Lenovo X1 is one of the few laptops we've seen that can lie completely flat.