Thinkpad X300 Specs Leaked 372
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.
Gizmondo is a failed handheld (Score:5, Informative)
I like the specs better (Score:3, Informative)
MacBook and ThinkPad not really competing (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Need video and wireless specs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Need video and wireless specs (Score:2, Informative)
Behold! (Score:4, Informative)
Black Air.
lenovo already has ultralight... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [notebookreview.com]
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.
Re:Dual Core CPU 2.0 Ghz / 880 Mhz ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Dual Core CPU 2.0 Ghz / 880 Mhz ? (Score:2, Informative)
on multi-core processors, each core runs at the same clock speed. unless one of the cores burns out, in which case its clock speed becomes 0.
Re:Is it actually a Thinkpad? (Score:1, Informative)
Please get rid of the stupid window keys and useless finger print readers. Thinkpads were amoung the last holdouts on earth for windows keys. It was a very good design tradeoff given the space constraints remaping one of the redundant ctrl/alt keys makes perfect sense. The fingerprint readers should be **optional on all models**
Please don't skimp on quality to lower the cost of your BOM or get rid of the 14.1 (non widescreen) XGA format. People pay more for the thinkpad line because of quality and deserve to get something for it.
Dual core CPUs are useless for notebooks and just suck more battery life with little or no returns for average use. Please keep low power single core options alive.
Don't ever even even think about getting rid of the red button mouse but DO seriously concider removing the useless trackpad.
Dual hotswap (Everything is SATA nowadays anyway) HDD slots for redundancy with some sort of release button with optional locking screw - rather than screws to easily swap HDD. I want to be able to replace a failed drive without rebooting.
Ability to have more than 4 GB RAM.
Re:Need video and wireless specs (Score:5, Informative)
Card readers and express card slots went the way of the floppy and serial port.
Re:Behold! (Score:3, Informative)
OS X Intel does not work all that well on Thinkpads if you actually want to use them as a laptop. It installs just fine and some people actually use theirs that way. However, sleep mode doesn't work due to an incompatibility between OS X and the Thinkpad's ACPI implementation regarding power states S1 vs. S3; the computer will fail to wake up and give a BIOS error message that the system configuration has been tampered with, after which you need to go into BIOS setup, go out again and boot normally.
It would be sleek to have OS X reliably working on Thinkpads, but without sleep mode, the whole laptop thing kind of loses its point.
Re:I like the specs better (Score:2, Informative)
It depends a lot. The idea is nice, but also has a lot of disadvantages:
* You'll have to find a power plug for this thing (yes, also for the laptop, but finding one power plug is easier than finding two)
* The companies security policy has to allow you to install a wireless device into the network
* The wireless device has to be able to authenticate properly to the customers network - support a variety of 802.1x/EAP authentication schemes
* I would probably lose the device in a week
Especially #2 would be prohibitive for me. But, if it works for your customers then it is a good solution.
Re:why are thinkpads so ugly? (Score:4, Informative)
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/10/richard_sapper/index_01.htm [businessweek.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad [wikipedia.org]
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 [liquid-light.org]
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...
Re:I like the specs better (Score:2, Informative)
Please don't refer to MacOS version 10 as 'X'.
Microsoft tried to steal the 'X' moniker with Active-X and with the X-Box. Apple has tried to steal it with Mac OS-X.
X is the term for the X Window System and has been since back when Apple was just eying the 68000 processor as a potential platform, and Microsoft was trying to figure out how to get past the 640K barrier.
SSD not ideal (Score:3, Informative)
It's not that I'm against SSDs, but I'd prefer to have both flash and regular hard disk, or a hybrid disk. I've been experimenting with fast thumb drives and CF cards up to 166x, which is rated just like a CD-ROM drive: 1x = 150kb/second, so 166x is 24 MiB/sec. You can go higher form more $$$, maybe 40 MiB/s? Not shabby for flash, but orders of magnitude below a cheap hard drive.
I'm considering going with a SSD for booting and most static data, a nice hunk of RAM with 64 bit linux to avoid much swapping, then a very modest hard disk for thing where there's a writing, including swap space. Why wear out your flash drive to experience frustration.