The Lenovo ThinkPad T400s, with “s” could mean as “a small,” or sometimes as  “surprising” is an evolutionary  progression of Thinkpad T400. We all know it’s a suitable for all-purpose business laptop.  So it might be grow an question how did Lenovo improve on a laptop that already offered a great balance of advantages? For starters, it slimmed down the profile (big time), beefed up the ports, and integrated GOBI (for Wireless WAN access).

Measuring 0.8 inches thick and sporting a starting weight of 4 pounds, the T400s is one of the lighter all-purpose laptops around. It makes the old T400 (at 1.5 inches thick and around 6.5 pounds) look downright big-boned. What’s even more impressive is that the T400s still manages to squeeze in a lot of the extras that business users require. This model is literally lined with ports. Whether it’s the five-in-one flash card reader or the space allotted for a 9.5mm DVD-ROM burner (or Blu-ray option), this machine has you covered. It even has stuff that might seem like overkill, such as VGA and a DisplayPort option, but even that gives you the opportunity to plug in two monitors. I’m personally a big fan of the built-in USB/eSATA port, which is perfect for high-speed data jockeys. (What I’d love to see in the next iteration is more than one pass-through USB charge port for powering USB devices while the laptop is off; for anyone with too many gadgets and power supplies, this feature is incredibly handy.)

The ThinkPad T400s earned a sound mark of 112 in our WorldBench 6 test suite, smoking the trim Acer TravelMate 6293 (and many of the other all purposes laptops in our Top 10, for that matter) and coming in about 20 points faster than the T400. Applications loaded swiftly on the 128GB SSD hard drive, which uses an Intel Core 2 Duo SP9600 processor with 2GB of RAM. To help cut down the size of the system, however, the company dropped the discrete graphics card. That downshift to Intel’s integrated graphics will prevent you from using the T400s for games. But this is a business box, after all.

Starting at $1599, the Lenovo ThinkPad T400s can be a compelling little laptop. Of course, once you start adding all the bells and whistles, the price kicks up significantly (our model, as reviewed, sells for $2130). Still, thanks to sturdy construction and great performance packed inside a slim profile, the T400s is a winner, and great for the jet-setter who wants a little more out of their mobile machine.