A More Detailed Review of the Lenovo Thinkpad X61 Tablet (Part 1)

This is a more thorough review than my preliminary review.

Okay. I’ve been using my tablet for about two months.

There are a few gripes, a few concerns, and a few great things.

Let’s begin at the beginning.

1. The Thinkpad X61 Tablet is, you guessed it, a tablet. This means that it is more expensive than regular laptops.

2. a. Lenovo bought the Thinkpad division from IBM. This means that you get what was inherited from IBM’s style.

b.Thinkpads are very black. They are relatively minimalistic in terms of color and in terms of business computers. I still prefer the style of the Mac laptops, but that’s just me.

3. The tablet uses an active digitizer stylus. This means that you can have the stylus hover over the screen, and the mouse pointer will follow if the stylus is close enough to the screen.

4. a. All new tablets also have multi-touch. I got an old (August era) tablet. Since

b. The screen is about 12 inches,

c. I got a laptop with ultra-high (1400*1050) resolution monitor without multi-touch.

d. I read that multi-touch screens on the Thinkpad tablet require use of fingernails. One of my classmates has an HP tablet with multi-touch. He requires fingernails. This is not like what you see in the iPhone commercials. I’m also not sure about the type of stylus the new tablet uses. It may be like the Palm Pilot styli (I take Latin, okay?), so you might have to get used to it. The disadvantage of the multi-touch screen is that you don’t get as high of a resolution, if that’s your thing. My resolution makes everything very small.

5. Fingerprint reader! ‘Nuff said.

6. Ports on the left side of the computer:

a. 1 Ethernet port

b. 1 external display or projector

c. 1 USB port

d. 1 PCMCIA card slot

e. 1 SD card reader. Very convenient.

f. 1 place to store the stylus.

7. Ports on the right side of the computer:

a. 1. Power port (obviously!)

b. 1 cable modem (read: dial-up)/phone jack port

c. 1 microphone port

d. 1 headset port

e. 2 USB ports

f. 1 Firewire/IEEE 1394 port (note: this is the small type).

8. I got an 8-cell battery. It is big and heavy compared to the rest of the laptop, but

a. I can hold the computer with one hand using it (it’d be like holding a book by its spine, but the spine is sticking out by a a few centimeters)

b. I can get longer battery life.

8 (cont.). If you want ultra-portable with minimal weight and don’t care about taking your power cord with you (which, mind you, is inconvenient for me), get a 4-cell. Otherwise, get an 8-cell.

9. The built-in speakers are bad. Mono. Tinny-ish. Facing down, which means you can’t decently listen to music with a lap-top.

10. Fan: not the quietest, but much quieter than those awful Dell fans.

11. Touch pad (or lack thereof). No touchpad. Get over it.  Instead, you get a Trackpoint.

12. Screen. It smudges extremely. If you don’t want any smudges, I’d recommend that you not use the touch functionality of this computer. Smudges are also hard to remove.

13. Weight. It weighs about 4 pounds. Ultraportable!!!!!

14. No CD drive. CD drive was taken out to allow for #13. You can buy a $100 dock and put a drive with some other unneeded stuff in there. I’d just get an external cd drive (if you can get a firewire drive, all the better).

15. Keyboard. It’s not as firm as the Dell keyboards. You can wiggle the keys by a millimeter or two. It has great tactile response, though. Very snappy.

16. Tablet buttons. The tablet has a power button, a lock switch for the power button, a screen rotation button, an escape button, a tablet shortcut menu, and a ctrl+alt+delete button. All buttons (except the power button) are configurable, courtesy of Windows Vista. To the right is the fingerprint scanner, which works in both directions. There is also an up/down/left/right/enter keypad-thing, which is good for reading ebooks.

to be continued…