Very occasionally, a product comes along that makes you wonder why nothing like it has ever been made before. And that’s precisely the feeling we had

Very occasionally, a product comes along that makes you wonder why nothing like it has ever been made before. And that’s precisely the feeling we had holding the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 for the first time. It weighs a feather-light 1.45kg, but includes a full-sized keyboard, a 13-inch widescreen and a built-in optical drive. It all seems so simple.

Once you start analysing though, you realise products like this could only appear in 2008. For the first time, technologies like solid-state-disks, low voltage processors and optical drives have reached a point they can be miniaturised – or, in the case of solid-state disks, mass produced – without making unbearable sacrifices