Lenovo's newest notebook is particularly designed for small-business road warriors at an affordable price. The sub-$1,000 ThinkPad Edge E220s brings a glossy, streamlined look to Lenovo’s renowned family of business notebooks and attributes Intel’s "Sandy Bridge" processor technology. Swathe in a long-lasting magnesium-aluminum-alloy framework, this travel-friendly 12.5-inch notebook is built to carry on life on the road.

You do not get an optical drive with this model, and it cannot match the battery life of equally priced ultraportable, but it does offer plenty of the business-friendly goodies that one can expect from anticipate from the ThinkPad line and delivers solid performance to boot.

Prices start at $749, tested configuration comes with a 320GB hard drive that spins at 7,200-RPM. You can save $70 if you configure it with a slower (5,400-rpm) 250GB drive, or spend an extra $280 for a swift 128GB solid state drive. Nevertheless, you can run the price up to around $1,500 by opting for a bit faster CPU and adding things like a solid-state drive and mobile broadband.