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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."
Run Linux or OpenBSD or my favourite, FreeBSD? Can I actually use the tablet features with those OSs?
Just asking.
So, I'd get one if it had linux support for the tablet functions. It seems like right now, if you really want to explore the full functionality of tablets, you have to be running a non-free operating system. One would think that IBM, with all its talk, would help in this regard. Anyone have positive experiences getting full tablet functionality under linux? Including word recognition...
Deconstruct the State
If the tablet is facing a mirror, will the display properly orientate itself to be readable in a mirror?
When does the regular show come back on?
The X60 looks like a Toshiba M400 without a CD/DVD drive - much like the M200.
My question is, how does the Core Duo 1.8Ghz Low Voltage CPU performance compare to the standard Core Duo 1.8Ghz CPU in the M400.
The low voltabe CPU is definitely a perfect match for the use of this laptop (7hours!), but I agree the onboard video really drags this and like all tablets down the drain if you plan to do any 3d work or gaming so to speak.
The idea of a tablet is to be portable and not bulky, ideally, the size of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. In terms of processing power, what do you need a more powerful processor for? I could only imagine playing CS or any other game with a digitizer pen. "The guy fragged me! as I slammed down my pen!" In terms of graphics, is due to battery life consideration. Running an ATI or NVidia chip will increase the power required to run everything and greatly reducing the battery life. On an average ThinkPad system running an ATI or NVidia chip decreases the battery life by almost 1/2 as compared to the integrated 128MB Intel graphics card.
IBM sold off the laptop division quite a while ago.
Blar.
I thought these have been out a while. I've seen them at microcenter for months...
I forgot to include the link to where I referenced the battery life http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=40
Ultraportables are 2.5 pounds and lighter. 3.5 pounds is just too much.
Some companies (Apple, IBM(Lenovo),Acer, etc) just do not know how to build small and light. If Sharp, Sony, Fujitsu, Samsung can build 2 pound laptops and lighter why cant Lenovo and Apple?
Towards the end, IBM's choice of laptop hardware and their BIOS ACPI tables worked very well with Linux. IBM's support may translate some, since Lenovo started from a good position and were not necessarily inclined to deviate for no reason (Also, Lenovo bought the employees too, so the tendency would be strong). My biggest concern is if they continued to take care to do the ACPI tables properly or not going forward, but having the same firmware developers gives me hope.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I visited the Lenovo web site this AM looking for a machine for my daughter to use in grad school. Parts availability and the 3-year warranty add a lot of value. Where'd the warranty go?
Do not look into LASER with remaining eye!
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.
/Yes I am bitter and slaving away on a 3 year old T-40 while my managment chain tells me that anyone with a 900Mhz CPU or higher is not eligible for a hardware upgrade, indefinitely. That puts my 3 year old machine at least 2 more years from replacement. That ought to be fun trying to run, support and patch XP Pro on a 5 year old machine in the 2008-9 timeframe while MS has its hands full trying to keep Vista from running off the rails.
Moreover, Lenovo clearly has a demarc between consumer models (N series, V series, etc.) and their corporate customer brand (Thinkpad). 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. It's at least $900 too high for that. I'm sorry but to me this sounds like another one of those glitzy PC's your Director gets while you toil away on a 3 year old T-40. Frankly I'm shocked they haven't built seamless functionality with a Blackberry and/or Treo 700 into it since that's the sweet spot of the people who are bound to get one of these. And of course it needs a docking station and massive audio.
But in either case, if you Joe Shmoe picks one of these up for your own use, what kind of support are you going to get from the channel that typically handles big customers who buy hundreds or thousands of units at a clip? Think they'll put your pissant problem at the top of the queue?
And for the record. I have a Lenovo N100 as well and while I love it, someone needs to shoot the person in the head who decided on the price points for hard drive upgrades. Lenovo wants more than $120 to upgrade an 80GB drive for a 120GB. That is patently insane.
Just a quick correction, not that it really affects your post. But, IBM sold off the Thinkpad line to Lenovo. So, this isn't really IBM versus Toshiba, but Lenovo versus Toshiba.
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
4 hour run time. I'll pass. Wake me up when they make something competitive with Panasonic R5
laptop or Electrovaya tablets.
aesthetics - the study of the nature and expression of beauty
assthetics - the study of a (usually female) person's J-Lo rating
asthetics - ???
Oh no... it's the future.
What about Vista?
Until you get to the two grand range, it seems like Lenovo is adverse to using decent 3D videocards even in their regular laptops. I know you can still run Vista without the fancy 3D effects, but the lower-end 3D chipsets don't take that much power.
>You mean you'd rather have one of those bathroom fixture-lookin' Apples that just exude indecisiveness and shallow fashion obsession?
>Taste is in the eye of the beholder.
Indeed.
And vision is in his mouth.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Might be worthwhile to wait for Santa Rosa platform in April/May. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino#Napa_platfor m
Why would they help out? Thinkpads are not their product anylonger.
Speaking of,what is up with the ibm logo on that picture of the tablet?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My HP dv4000 I bought a year ago lasts 6-6.5 hours with the extended 12 cell battery (and it has an ATI x700 in it too) after undervolting, ATI Powerplay, and making sure the HDD turns off when possible. Sure, the battery sticks out a bit, but I always laugh at people who's laptops die after 4 hours. :P
Just don't expect amazing battery life and a high powered laptop. Keep your CS:S and HL2 skills on a desktop where they belong.
I don't have a problem with the CPU speed or graphics card, my problem with it is the OS sucks.
Now, a machine like that with OS X running on it...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
My fujitsu t4010, with a modular battery (ie swap out the CD drive) gets on average 7.5 hours without wireless and 6.5 with wi-fi turned on. It's slightly slow by today's standards (pentium m 2.1) but it is worth it for the battery life.
My Dell D820 consistently gets around 4-5 hours with the 9 cell battery. When I add the 6-cell media bay battery in place of the DVD writer I usually get 6:30 to 7:30 hours.
As the author of the article states, "1024x768 resolution could use an upgrade".
What he failed to mention though, was that this resolution was already very poor and uncompetitive in a well-featured tablet PC back in 2004 !!! As a clear fan of his X41t and X60s, I think he's reviewing the new Lenovo through rose-tinted spectacles.
I looked at the X-series along with many others when I was researching for my own tablet PC some 2+ years ago (before that I had a Thinkpad), and the Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet came out miles ahead on so many fronts that it was like something out of the future, yet it was very cheap compared to its rivals: 1069 UK pounds in 2004.
Graphically, there was just no comparison: the Tosh has a terrific 1400x1050 screen (driven by nVidia 6200 Go), and as this is a convertible tablet (the laptop screen swivels around and folds back down flat for tablet use), this lovely screen supports pen-proximity sensing too, as well as the usual touch pad and Thinkpad-like nipple on the keyboard.
The Tosh is tightly packed with other features too (Wifi, Bluetooth, Firewire, SD card, PCMCIA, gigabit Ether, excellent Linux support), but graphics is the killer advantage that decided the choice. Lenovo's 1024x768 was pretty poor even back in 2004, but now it is simply unacceptable on any but the most basic laptops, and in an otherwise-sexy Lenovo tablet it is so completely out of place that I find it just totally incongruous.
I liked my old Thinkpad, but if Lenovo are going to attract people like me "back to the fold", they need to take a very serious look at their specs compared to the competition.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Beleive me, the swivelling screen makes jaws drop. It also doesn't have that ugly sealing ridge around the edge of the top screen that most thinkpads do.
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
I just got a Fujitsu Lifebook 1610 convertible tablet/notebook with the 6 cell battery pack, which brings the weight up to 2.5 pounds from the 2.2 pounds it weighs with the 3 cell pack. I'm getting 4 to 7 hours depending on how I'm using it - movies, books, drawing, etc. I'm very happy with the 1610 - it's actually the tablet I've been waiting for. 2.5 pounds is still too heavy, but the UMPCs that are coming in around 1 pound require so many add-ons (portable keyboard, USB-RJ45 dongle, etc.) and too tiny screens (4.5") they're less usable, less convenient, and ultimately more expensive. My second runner up was a TabletKiosk eo.
My X41 tablet running GNU/Linux with the 8-cell battery (actually makes it much easier to hold in slate/portrait mode) lasts about 5 hours on battery with automatic CPU scaling on. It scales the clock speed down to 600Mhz when not in use, such as when you're reading =). I'm not sure if/how this works in Windows, but I'd be surprised if it didn't have a similar feature. Not because I any sort of faith in Windows, but because I don't see IBM/Lenovo putting in features that aren't usable from Windows.
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
this is slashdot where america is wrong because the british government kills a man by accident because of his suspicious activity and should be overthrown for it but if the chinese or the muslims execute thousands it's just part of their culture. welcome to the world of political correctness.
also be aware that if you are an american that:
we're the only ones with fat people
we're mostly illiterate
we're the only country that burns fossil fuels (and thus are the single country responsible for global warming)
we're responsible for every inkling of racism/religious intolerance (let's forget the holocaust, pol pot, rwanda and stalin, if you bring that up it's just Godwins law being true and not a real incident in history)
we're a nation of bible beating christians (even though we have no national church/religion, we have legalized abortion, we have openly gay/atheist/non-christians in our government/schools/corporate elite)
but at the same time we're the ones who are continually turned to to come up with solutions to the worlds problems even though we're the ones who cause all of them.
1400x1050 (SXGA+) resolution on a 12.1" screen? That's suicide! XGA on a 12.1" is relatively small as it is.
Why would anyone buy a computer from a company that's owned mostly by the Chinese Government?
Because if we don't buy the laptops they will use them in their missiles?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Slashdot demands a laptop that can play PenQuake and DoomWrite for hours on end AND at a minimum of 10sps (strokes per second).
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Problem number one: CPU crippled by Lenovo. Is this model also affected?
(Short story: Lenovo disabled hardware virtualization in BIOS, one of selling point of Core processors)
:wq
I refuse to do ANYTHING in under 15 sps.
This isn't a tablet, it's a convertible. Very different features and audience.
I bought a Raven X60 from Emperor Linux this summer. It's a very nice machine and is just perfect for cafés where my nine pound Dell is inconvenient. Amortized over the last six months, my café drinks are down to less than $100 each!
Although Emperor Linux claims that they have many of the key laptop specific features working out of the box, I've found that not to be the case. Sleep, hibernate and dial-up modem capabilities never worked for me from day one. Also, you have to pay the Redmond Tax, so I had them not uninstall Windows XP and make it a dual boot machine. It's a good thing too, because it turned out to be the only way I could get online at some motels.
I've also run into problems with WiFi because one of my favourite coffee shops, Bluff City Coffee, because they provide access through a Cisco access point with WPA and a security protocol I'd never heard of before. It works easily with Windows, but it was tough to get it to work with Ubuntu. Evenutally we got it figured out, but it still blocks apt-get packages, so I have to download them manually, which isn't exactly a common thing for me to do in a café anyways.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
My IBM laptops last about 4 hours, and my HTC Universal PDA with broadband Internet and Opera browser lasts up to 8 hours. Manufacturers often sell extended batteries, and if not then you can always carry with you more than 1 battery and change.
What a wonderful notebook. Unfortunately, I see no GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA antenna built-in. I wonder why notebook manufacturers keep releasing subnotebooks with no built-in Internet capability. An innovative company has released Flybook which can connect to the Internet with up to 1.8mbps speed through HSDPA 3G networks. While it's true that you can just put a PCMCIA card and have 3G in every laptop, I think that the internal antenna worths the extra money. All high-end PDAs, like HTC Universal, have 3G connectivity nowadays, but few high-end laptops have it. In this sense, PDAs seem to be more advanced than laptops. I just wonder when manufacturers will wake up and understand that built-in GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA connectivity in a laptop multiplies its value to the user more than one hundred times.
A very good tablet that can run GNU/Linux and Windows XP, and has an internal 3G antenna for Internet access on the go, is Flybook. I own two. The only problem with them is their price (up t0 4000 EUR for a fully equipped top model with accessories, etc.). The old models I own, A33i, also had that Transmeta CPU that slowed down the machine a lot, but the new models, V33, have a Pentium M at 1.1 GHz which ought to be enough.
... and sacrifice mobility.
As an owner of an Inspiron e1705 with a core 2 duo T7200, and an geforce go 7900gs cross flashed with the 7900gtx bios and overclocked while attached to a WUXGA display, I can confidently say that I love my laptop, and because of the dual 8 cell non-exploding lithium ion batteries it still has great battery life. Although it's a little heavy, it's still nothing like what laptops used to weigh! Hell, my first laptop weighed more than my desktop.
www.isoHunt.com
If you plan to run Linux on it, on the other hand, the onboard video is perfect -- yay Intel GPL video drivers!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Talk to me in about a month or so (when my X60t -- ordered a week ago -- finally arrives). I'll actually be able to tell you whether OSX86 works "well enough" on it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
What he really failed to mention is that the X60t has a choice of three screens: a regular 1024x768, a 1024x768 touchscreen/outdoor readable, or a 1400x1050 SXGA+ screen. Granted, it still has Intel graphics, but a 6200 isn't that much better, and since the X60t is (much) lighter and smaller than the Toshiba it's worth it.
Of course, the downside is that the SXGA+ screen is backordered or something -- according to Lenovo's website, my X60t isn't scheduled to ship until February. : (
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
For web browsing, emailing, and ssh my T22 worked great with Debian Sid and T23 is the same. SXGA+ is great but unfortunately I think my T23 will be the last Thinkpad I'll own. Despite the pretty name, Lenovo is still a part of the butcher shop.
It doesn't block apt-get. Apt uses http or ftp, and I bet you have set it up to use ftp, which the coffee shop probably blocks. Modify your sources.list to tell it to use http instead, and you'll be fine.
I agree the onboard video really drags this and like all tablets down the drain if you plan to do any 3d work or gaming
Toshiba has a Tablet PC in their Tecra lineup now with an option for an NVIDIA graphics board. They hide it pretty well though. You have to actual go to the "Customize" screen to see that the NVIDIA graphics are an option.
Tecra M7 is the model. This link probably won't work but I'll give it a try anyway: Tecra M7
I'm typing from one right now! It's great.
Check your T22, I bet there are important parts that were made in China. Lenovo was a major OEM maker for IBM long before their taking over the IBM PC department. Check other brands that you are considering to buy as well. There is high chance that they are made in China as well. I would suggest you only use pen and paper in order to avoid Chinese product. Oh, wait, they could be made in China as well.
Actually, I do. I avoid ALL products made in China if there are alternatives I can find and afford. For the same reason, I choose Creative Zen Version M over iPod. I also buy New Balance shoes or Matterhorn boots made in the US. I do my best and I'm satisfied knowing that at least I did my part. The last time I check, Lamy, Namiki, and Pelican fountain pens are still made outside of China and I use Moleskine note pads. So, yes, I do my sure my pen and paper at not made in China. Unfortunaly, it is becoming harder and harding to to avoid product made in China.
Face with cheaper products most people may have forgotten about Tiananmen but I have a hard time letting it go. . . . . maybe I should stop listening to RATM. . . . who knows. . .