Thinkpad X60 — the Tablet Goes Ultraportable

Rovi writes "Lenovo had a gift for Thinkpad fans this season- they finally released the successor to the X41 Tablet. The Thinkpad X60 Tablet weighs in at about three and a half pounds and has great tablet functionality. The updates from the older model include a 2.5" hard drive (the X41 used a 1.8"), automatic screen orientation, and an Intel Core Duo processor. For performance seekers some serious upgrades are available, such as a 120GB 5400RPM hard drive, 100GB 7200RPM drive, SXGA+ monitor, or up to 4GB of RAM."

Comments

Great commercial.

[skitz0]

When does the regular show come back on?

Re:Long overdue? It's in the wrong sales channel

[crazy.tyae]

Color me cynical but when I hear something is long overdue I wonder if it's been thrown together quickly out of desperation. This model or models which check in at 4+lbs are not ultraportable. One would think that with a smallish screen it would come in a little lighter. Lenovo has been doing quite well, so I don't think this could be called a desperation move. 4+lbs is a bit hefty but you could always use the 4 cell battery which allows the unit to come in under 4 lbs. On the screen, this is certainly not smallish for an ultra-portable - average perhaps. I'm willing to accept the extra heft in return for the durability of the materials used to construct the tablet.

I have to wonder how they're going to support a consumer model like this out of the corporate channel since obviously there are zero corporations out there who are going to stock their inventories with this. Although I've heard some horror stories regarding the standard "depot" service, I've also heard a tot of positive stories. (See the thinkpads.com forums for some firsthand accounts.) Also keep in mind that the average Joe care also order 9x5 NBD service for additional $. (I believe this may be handled, at least in the U.S., by the same service which was used before Lenovo became involved.)

And of course it needs a docking station and massive audio. It has an optional dock. Massive audio? Are we still talking about ultra-portables? ;-)

Re:linux support?

[nostriluu]

I ran Debian on a Toshiba M200 (1.6ghz Pentium M, 2 GB RAM, 7200rpm HDD, dedicated NVidia video card). Good specs (at the time) for a 4 lb system, plus the tablet features. It was fast enough, and had a high res (but small) display so it was my primary dev system, although like the x60, it's a convertible, not a true tablet (big difference).

I never did focus on word recognition since I consider it awkward, and I didn't end up exploring the MS tablet integration features (some of which sound interesting) much before the XP partition died of a virus. Unfortunately, under Linux it was a challenge keeping the stylus, touchpad, rotation, power management, and video out working (or not). Not to mention the proprietary SD card reader. I'm no expert, but it was an unreasonable amount of very frustrating try-this, scanning outdated bulletin board conversations, etc work, and the implementations kept changing so if one thing is fixed, another breaks. This was 2004 - 2006, btw.

I did use it for some occasional drawing, and it was nice to be able to fold it down for some situations.

Having a vendor supported model would be a tremendous boost for Linux, and people like myself who want full vendor support. The kernel and the environment are of course separate, so it would really just take a 'certified' list of open source friendly hardware.