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Lenovo has set fears to rest that Intel Ivy Bridge ultrabooks would not be making an appearance at the CES show next week by cheekily pre-announcing the ThinkPad T430u ultrabook.
Jumping the gun on CES isn’t unusual as some manufacturers seek to gain a bit of limelight before the news crush of CES show but this announcement shows that at least one manufacturer is also happy to announce an ultrabook based on Intel’s next-generation Ivy Bridge chipset.
The ThinkPad T430u is the latest addition to Lenovo’s IBM-acquired business brand of beefy looking ThinkPads and far from unveiling a standard integrated graphics chipset, the T430u bundles a dedicated Nvidia graphics chip.
The 14-inch ultrabook will offer a choice of storage and SSD drives with six hours of battery life and, of course, a choice of processor from the upcoming Ivy Bridge range. Lenovo said that it’ll start at around $850, we reckon an SSD model with a higher processor will be well over the $1,000 mark.
Of course the problem with the ThinkPad T430u and other Ivy Bridge notebooks is that they will not appear until much later in the year. The T430u is scheduled for some time in the third quarter. Naturally, given the time frame, Lenovo described the laptop as ‘Windows 8 ready’.
So if you’re not shipping for nine months, what’s a few extra days for a nice paper launch?
