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Thinkpad X300 Specs Leaked
Kyokushi writes "Gizmodo reports that some specifications of a new ultralight Lenovo X300 have been leaked. 'It appears that Lenovo have themselves a new ultralight X300 series Thinkpad — and outside of the price and release date, we have all of the specs that you need to know. At a glance, some of the major features include: a 13.3-inch LED backlit 1440X900 screen, an ultralight 2.5 pound form factor, and Intel Merom Santa Rosa Dual Core CPU (2.0 Ghz / 880 Mhz ), a 64 GB SSD, up to 4GB of DDR2 PC2-5300 memory, and 4 hours of battery life.' If this is true, then Lenovo looks to have some heavy competition for the Macbook Air." Update: 01/20 22:55 GMT by S : Corrected Gizmondo->Gizmodo.
Gizmodo is the tech blog reporting this.
There are of course people going for the specs, but they are just as much about branding. The target markets has very little overlap.
:-), someone in the market for a new Volvo is unlikely to be swayed by a Porche, and vice versa.
The guy on the Gizmondo blog that compared it with Volvo vs Porche got it right (a car analogy always helps
The rest of the bloggers aso got it right, they focused on how ugly, boring, old fashioned, and conservative the Thinkpad looked (it looked like every other Thinkpad), which is exactly what the Thinkpad market wants. They don't want something looking flimsy and flashy as they would consider the MacBook Air to look.
TFA has all kinds of info. Check out this table of specs, as well as these tidbits here. It appears to sport integrated graphics; Discrete graphics are listed as "not supported", along with PCexpress cards and other card readers. As a side note, new laptop having neither an express card slot or any other card reader is quite surprising to me -- especially a high-budget product like a Lenovo.
Black Air.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
>If this is true, then Lenovo looks to have some heavy competition for the Macbook Air
Lenovo already has a computer in the ultralight space, the X61. The X61 has almost identical specs to the macboook air, at a much lower price and significantly higher clockspeed.
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3765
Looking at this new machine, I really like that they've lowered the weight more and slightly increased the screen size; however, I have to wonder what the point of a 1440X900 resolution is at 13' inches.
I also have to ask what the point of including a touch pad is, when you have one of those "keyboard nipple" trackpoints. The trackpoints are so ridiculously and unambiguously superior to a touch pad, that it just seems like a waste of space.
The third issue with the new spec, is that it is still VGA output instead of DVI output. Pretty much all modern monitors have DVI inputs, so I don't see the point of going with the old standard.
Finally, I'm not convinced of the benefits of a flash harddrive. If they are saving weight, that's nice (although I'm not sure they are lighter). However, it's a pretty small drive, and it is a myth that flash drives are faster. Flash drives have better random access, but slower sequential access, and most accesses are sequential. Things are going to seem *slower* moving to flash, not faster.
Dual-core CPUs are always (at least to my knowledge) the same speed in both cores. The "2.0 Ghz / 880 Mhz" would be indicating that the processor is 2GHz with an 880MHz bus.
All extra peripherals are replaced with USB devices. There is no need to complicate the interface anymore. USB is ubiquitous. Maybe firewire would have been a better solution, but Apple butchered it by requiring manufacturers pay royalties while USB had a royalty-free implementation from the start. Clearly, free-market spoke and USB is king.
Card readers and express card slots went the way of the floppy and serial port.
The original old ThinkPad design is the one in MOMA - designed by Richard Sapper.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/10/richard_sapper/index_01.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad
It's a nicely detailed design. His most famous design would be the Tizio lamp, as seen in flash offices in movies from the 80's:
http://land.liquid-light.org/tizio/tizio-treff.jpg
You can kinda see the same aesthetic carrying over: simple, straight lines, technical, precise.
Sapper is an interesting guy - no industrial design training, just picked it up and got world famous.
Since then, IBM/Lenovo seem to have diluted the original design intent until now all you've got is the fact that it's black and boxy. I don't think they really understood the design language they inherited, and most of the stuff in the ThinkPad line is just darn hideous. Lines and edges all over the place, arbitrarily mixed with curves (NO curves in the original). The fact they claim lineage in that he 'influences' their current design doesn't convince me he actually creates it.
mod (-1): pretentious - go ahead...
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore