Lenovo's 14-inch T-series business laptops are the ultimate productivity tools for many users. This screen size is pretty much dead in the consumer space, but still very popular for office devices. Lenovo's portfolio of high-end systems includes the two devices from the T-series (T490 and T490s) as well as the flagship X1 Carbon. Today we review the ThinkPad T490s, which got the second full chassis overhaul in two years. The Chinese manufacturer probably wanted to ensure a gap to the new (and also updated) ThinkPad T490. This means the T490s is another step closer to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which will have to wait until June for the next update.

Our test sample carries the designation ThinkPad T490s-20NYS02A00 and is equipped with a modern Core i5 processor, the new Low Power 1080p screen, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD. It is a so called Campus model for students and teachers without OS and currently retails for 1259 Euros (~$1406), which is a very good price. There is currently no comparable Topseller SKU, but other T490s systems with less RAM/storage start at 1599 Euros (~$1786).

The new ThinkPad T490s shares its motherboard design with the ThinkPad X390, which means that you do not get an option for a dedicated graphics card anymore. If you want more GPU performance than Intel's UHD Graphics can offer, you either have to get the ThinkPad T490 (optional MX250) or wait a few weeks for the AMD version of the T490s. Its integrated AMD Vega GPU in the new T495s should be much more powerful than the UHD Graphics of our test sample.

The competition in the premium business segment is big and all major manufacturers (Dell, HP, and Lenovo) offer very good products. Over the course of this review, we will compare the ThinkPad T490s with devices such as the Dell Latitude 7490, HP EliteBook 840 G5 and the Fujitsu LifeBook U748. All these models will be updated in the upcoming weeks as well, but for now we have to use the "old" versions. Lenovo also offers interesting alternatives like the new ThinkPad T490 or the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, even though the latter is quite a bit more expensive.



Update September 2019: The rating drops from 92% to 89% due to our updated Rating system v7.