Lenovo's ThinkCentre Tiny PC: Big Durability in a Small Body

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Lenovo's new ThinkCentre Tiny may be the perfect combination of power and size with military-spec durability in a super small port-packed case.

BERLIN - Lenovo vice president and Thinkpad division general manager Dilip Bhatia is so confident in the toughness of the new ThinkCentre Tiny PC, he dropped it on the floor in front of hundreds at IFA. And then he stepped on it.

Remember, this is for a business-minded small form-factor system that may never see the light of day. But it goes to show the lengths to which Lenovo is willing to take the design of its commercial products. Then we get to the machine's innards, which for the top-of-the-line M900 Tiny, make up the most powerful computer per cubic inch on the planet, according to Lenovo.

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The M900 will start at $749 with a new 6th-generation Intel Skylake CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive and ramp up from there, while the less powerful M700 and M600 models begin at $499 and $399, respectively.

In a brief hands-on at Lenovo’s Global Press Event at IFA, I got a chance to check out the Tiny’s fortitude for myself. It was easy to see why Lenovo's Bhatia could be so cavalier in how he treated the new PC. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say I’ve held bricks that felt less substantial than the diminutive steel-clad PC, and part of the quality assurance testing for the Tiny involves a round of military-spec durability tests.

The front-mounted ports consist of two USB 3.0 ports and dedicated jacks for a headphone and mic. In back, you get another four USB 3.0 ports, along with two DisplayPorts, Ethernet, power and a threaded screw for a Wi-Fi antenna.

Like the previous model, the Tiny can also be packaged with a monitor to create a pseudo all-in-one. In either configuration the Tiny can support up to three displays, all from its pint-sized case.

If you're already chomping at the bit to see how rugged the ThinkCentre Tiny can be, Lenovo should be pushing it out sometime before the end of the year.

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Sam Rutherford

Sam is a Senior Writer at Engadget and previously worked at Gizmodo as a Senior Reporter. Before that, he worked at Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag as a Staff Writer and Senior Product Review Analyst, overseeing benchmarks and testing for countless product reviews. He was also an archery instructor and a penguin trainer too (really).