Hands-on: ThinkPad TrackPoint Bluetooth Keyboard

Stumbled onto a sale at a ThinkPad shop on Taobao — both the ThinkPad TrackPoint Bluetooth Keyboard and the 6-cell battery (72Wh) for the X250 were going for good prices. I’d just returned a bunch of stuff I bought for Spring Festival and had some money sitting in Alipay, so I bought them.

Both shipped from Beijing, and fast enough…

First, the keyboard:

The key feel sits somewhere between the X250 and X230. The keycaps don’t feel as good as the X230’s, but the rebound is much better than the X250’s, and the travel is long enough. Overall it’s fine.

I checked the serial number and it’s genuine. But the QC on this genuine unit is nothing to write home about.

Some of the function keys are already crooked, for instance.

This Bluetooth keyboard uses a built-in battery — meaning you don’t have to stuff batteries into it. Battery life unknown, and I couldn’t find anywhere to check it either; there’s just a small LED in the top right corner.

The switch is on the right side, and the keyboard has a kickstand you can open.

Pairing with the X230 under Windows 10 was quick. After the first connection, Windows Update just pulls Lenovo’s official driver for you, and after that middle-click scrolling on the TrackPoint works without a hitch.

I got this keyboard on sale for 200. Sure, there are plenty of good mechanical Bluetooth keyboards out there, but ones with a built-in TrackPoint still have a convenience nothing else replaces.

Next, the battery. My X250 was supposed to come standard with a 6-cell, but that battery turned out to be 44Wh, when the 6-cell they advertise is supposed to be 72Wh. The funnier part is that both are 6-cell — different capacity, same size.

The big one’s on top, the small one below.

With the big battery in, the effect is dramatic: 72Wh + 24Wh is enough to squeeze out 8+2 = 10 hours of runtime.

Combined with the X250’s hot-swappable battery support, once I pick up an external battery charger, power basically stops being a worry. The X250’s biggest shortcoming was originally that the RAM couldn’t go to 16GB; according to Reddit and the official site, a single 16GB stick works — I just need to wait for the price to drop.

Maybe the X250 will last me a long while yet.