Lenovo Thinkpad L480 i5-8th-Gen/8GB Ram/256 GB SSD/ 14″ Screen

Durability and Security

The ThinkPad L480 is MIL-SPEC tested, meaning it’s capable of withstanding extreme temperatures, high altitudes, solar radiation, fungus, humidity, mechanical shock, high vibration and sand damage.

As for security features, the L480 has a Match-in-Sensor fingerprint reader and a secure lock slot.

Ports

Along the ThinkPad L480’s left side, you’ll find a USB Type-C port and a Type-C mechanical docking port.

There’s also a microSD card reader, an Ethernet port, an HDMI 1.4 port and a USB 3.1 port.

The right side houses a headphone/microphone combo jack, another USB 3.1 port and a secure lock slot.

Display

The ThinkPad L480’s 14-inch, 1920 x 1080 display is underwhelming. In the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 trailer, colors were less vibrant than expected. The giant squid monster’s tentacles lacked the same vibrant pink hue found on my personal monitor (a NEC MultiSync PA271W), and the surrounding glowing-orange environment of the trailer’s opening sequence also failed to pop.

Furthermore, L480’s dim display caused the shadows on the same squid monster to obfuscate details and hide the monster’s fainter gross, gushy characteristics under a veil of darkness.

The ThinkPad L480 scored a lowly 66.3 percent on the sRGB color gamut test, which explains the panel’s unimpressive colors (the average is 112 percent). The Dell Latitude 5490 earned an even more disappointing score of 65 percent.

The ThinkPad L480 measured 208 nits of brightness on our light meter, which is nowhere near as bright as the 306-nit average. However, it beat the Latitude 5490’s 178 nits.

Keyboard, Touchpad and Pointing Stick

The ThinkPad L480 has a solid keyboard; the keys offer 1.5 millimeters of travel and require 70 grams of force to actuate, meaning key presses feel satisfying and responsive. This combination of well-engineered travel and actuation allowed me to score 94 words per minute with a 99-percent accuracy rate on the 10fastfingers.com typing test. That’s much higher than my usual 85 wpm with a 98-percent accuracy rate.

The 3.9 x 2.7-inch touchpad is fine for the most part, but it does not respond well to two-finger commands. When I tried to select text for copying and pasting using only the touchpad, it sometimes stuck and refused to capture the text I wanted, forcing me to operate with a single finger to get it to play nicely. And even then, single-digit inputs were slightly finicky, as they’d occasionally fail to register if they were made shortly after a two-finger motion.

Audio

The ThinkPad L480’s bottom-mounted speakers are simply not loud enough. Even at 100 percent volume, the audio failed to fill a small conference room. At max volume, the sound distorted and made the chimes in Sarah Schachner’s “Winds of Cyrene” sound like they were being played through a couple dozen wind socks, given how fuzzy they sounded.

Performance

The Lenovo ThinkPad L480 sports a 1.6-GHz Intel Core i5-8250U CPU with 8GB of RAM, a 256GB PCIe SSD and an Intel HD Graphics 620 integrated GPU. As I expected, it could run a hefty load of Google Chrome tabs without breaking a sweat.