X200 vs X220

Question

Just how much difference is there between the two?
I'm looking at buying a lightweight number to carry around in my rucksack and ride to work on my bike everyday.
I'm seeing X200's for under 200 quid and X220's for almost 3 times that, is it really 3 times better too?

Answer 1

In that case, you can leave the charger at home (it's not a monster but it's in no ways super light either, it's a very small brick style charger witch a detachable cable).  You can also leave out the slice battery, it's an added cost but it's great if you 'need' it.  You can also get it with the smallest model battery, it's the lowest capacity one that 'does not' stick out of the back of the laptop adding a sort or handle/grip.  This smaller one will make the system itself both smaller and lighter.  You can get the extra stuff as needed for occasional trips, etc.
So with that, I don't think you need to look at anything other than the internal specs of the machines you are comparing.  The price difference is major, so you just need do a bang for your buck check.  How much more powerful is the cpu, you can find benchmark tests online that will give you some clear idea.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2640M+%40+2.80GHz  that's the CPU I have on the x220
There are plenty of benchmark sites out there where you can compare any and all processors, sometimes these sites can be a pain to navigate but once you get at what your looking for it's very helpful.
The way I would do this when I was building desktop systems was to compare several parts, which is easier to quantify when you can do it on a piece by piece basis and will be a bit more difficult overall comparing one laptop to another, but still do-able.  So take the CPU.  x CPU is 15% more powerful on average to y CPU however x CPU costs 70% more money than y CPU.  y CPU in the above situation, is a much greater bang for your buck value so if that extra 15% isn't mission critical then y is the clear choice, as the 75% savings along with the later re-sale value of y, will allow for a cheap future purchase upgrade of CPU z which will likely be more powerful than x was to begin with...  Same considerations with the GPU etc., etc.,  and actually that is something of note here with these machines, though I don't have a specific answer, I can tell you that the intel integrated graphics on the x220 are quite quite good considering the lack of a dedicated GPU, that might be the one area where the x200 might not be able to stand up at all, but it might also be of no major concern, I do not know and it will depend a lot on your applications and OS.
and so on, do the same checks on..., how does the system RAM compare speed/latency/capacity etc., system features, HDD/upgrade-ability, etc., etc..  If your getting what you want out of the lower end model for a huge discount then just go with that, probably it won't last you as long until you 'need' an upgrade but if you can make do and don't mind a replacement sooner (or perhaps the specs are very close in numbers I don't know) then just get that.  Do a quick check to make sure all of the features of the tablet and system are up to par in the older model, I've heard good things about the older models in comparisons on Youtube from "jesse" I think his name is, who upgrade to a 220 and does a lot of xtablet reviews.