Review: Lenovo's ThinkPad T460s Is The Happy Medium Of The Ultrabook World

We've been trying out one of the newest laptops in Lenovo's ThinkPad line, the T460s, and at first it struck us as a bit of a bore compared to other devices that have come through the CRN Test Center lately, including Lenovo's own Yoga 900S.

But we’re absolutely not saying that’s a bad thing.

[Related: Review: Lenovo's Yoga 900S Is A Home Run On Flexibility And Style]

The 14-inch ultrabook is a zeitgeist-y take on the business-friendly ThinkPad -- with many of the features of other current laptop releases -- but it doesn't go overboard.

And the modest price reflects that, making the T460s a laptop we would recommend to solution providers, especially those that serve on-the-go professionals.

Ultimately, the device strikes us as a well-executed middle ground between the stereotypical ThinkPad and some of the flashier laptops now hitting the market.

It scores high on durability -- it's a ThinkPad, after all -- and it has a fairly high-res, 1,920-by-1,080 touch screen to give users another option to get productive.The T460s is lighter than many ThinkPads, at three pounds, and it's pretty thin too, at 0.74 of an inch.

The display also folds back 180 degrees, which has its uses but is probably more of a nice-to-have than a must-have.

The T460s that we tried came with a sixth-gen Core i5 processor from Intel, which packed plenty of power for our purposes.

The keyboard and touchpad are good, but not the best we've ever used, and the battery life is decent. Our two tests got 5.5 hours and six hours on a charge -- not quite the "all day" battery life promised by Lenovo, but not horrible considering that using the touch screen [which we did a fair amount of] tends to drain a battery quickly.

The model we tried was configured with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, and came with Windows 10 Pro.

For everything this laptop can do, the $1,196 price of the model as it was configured seems reasonable to us.

The outward differences between the T460s and other ThinkPads may not be noticeable enough to turn a lot of heads.

But for solution providers interested in finding a ThinkPad that's got a little more to it -- a little more portability, a little more flexibility, a little more fun -- this machine could be a great fit.