HTC Shift + ThinkPad X300 + MacBook Air = Perfect Notebook?

Tom's Hardware has an interesting look at the HTC Shift, the newest contender in the ultralight portable arena, with a strong compare and contrast to the other two heavyweights, the ThinkPad X300 and the Macbook Air. "As some of you know, I actually like the Macbook Air but found the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 to be a vastly more useful product in the class. I'm one of the few folks that have been using an early version of the HTC Shift , a smaller screened ultra light tablet with a keyboard and a touch screen which is superior to both offerings in some ways and just released on Amazon.com for $1500 (someone screwed up, this wasn't supposed to happen until next week). This got me thinking: The perfect next generation ultra-sexy notebook should be a blend of all three products."

toilet paper tube...

[stokessd]

800x480?! Why not just give us four handy red 7 segment displays to interact with.

Sure, I understand that small computers have small screens, but my aging ipac has a 640x480 screen the size of a baseball card and fits in my pocket. I take it that people who want small light computers are also blind? A screen that size could be 1400x900 and still be very usable.

Sheldon

Riiiiight....

[dazedNconfuzed]

has a small 800 x 480 pixel 7" touchscreen

For the same price I can get an ultraportable (3lbs) Sony VAIO with ~10" screen, real keyboard (only slightly scrunched), 1280x768 screen, and real everything else including optical drive and WAN radio. Heck, I've had two models over 5 years, wishing only for a stronger case and boot-from-USB; I carry it everywhere.

I'm not sure where the author thinks this toy is usable for anything but an overblown cellphone without the phone.

Next...

Re:I used one

[p0tat03]

Disagree on the Eee PC front. A friend of mine got one, and as light and nice as it is, the keyboard is simply unworkable. If I'm on the road and need to type up a long email, or just to take notes at a conference, the Eee PC would have my fingers aching in no time at all. IMHO the two sides of the rift are the MacBook Pro/ThinkPad/workhorse laptop, and a 12-13" notebook like the MacBook, XPS M1330, etc. The sub-10" market IMHO will not replace this, and will remain a relative niche.

Re:Did no one notice?

[grendelkhan]

I didn't even notice that until the end, and then I felt all dirty for clicking the link. Of course he like it better than the ThinkPad and the Air, he hates IBM and he hates Apple.

Re:Lets get small again

[LiquidCoooled]

You really should take a look at the nokia n810 (or even n800).
They have a similar form factor, run Maemo Linux and are great to use.

Not an Eee PC, it's a tablet

[Nightspirit]

The thing most of you people are not realizing is that the shift has tablet functionality which neither the eee pc, x300, or airbook have. Not only that, but it runs windows mobile as well as vista. I also believe it is GSM quad band/HSDPA (or at least it was supposed to when I read about it 5 months ago), so essentially it can replace your phone, PDA, and travel laptop. If I had 1.5k sitting around I'd definitely get one.

Re:Macbook air is FAR more than 2.5 hours...

[aetherworld]

On a sidenote: I don't get why people constantly compare the macbook air with other more or less lightweight notebooks or subnotebooks. The air is the most light weight notebook apple has to offer. And when I want or need OS X on a subnotebook, there is no alternative. Neither a HTC or IBM product will run OS X (at least not in the quality i'm used to).

However, if you seriously don't care about the operating system and can run linux or (worse) windows just as well, then you're stupid if you buy a macbook air.

Personally I won't run anything else than OS X on any of my machines (except my servers, that is) so I'm going for a macbook air.

Fuck HTC

[Vegeta99]

Fuck HTC.

I bought an AT&T Tilt (HTC TyTN II Rebrand) and it came with the Qualcomm MSM7200 chipset that's supposed (and was advertized) to have ATi hardware 3D rendering and hardware video assist. It seems, however, that even though these features were advertised, HTC users weren't given them. Some amateur research says that it's because of a Broadcomm patent lawsuit against Qualcomm with a judgement preventing them from making drivers (but they were allowed to sell what processors were already being made under other contractual obligation).

See this Firehose article. [slashdot.org] The videos on htcclassaction.org demonstrate the issue very well.

Ontological Argument for the Existence of Exploits

[muchawi]

That is a brilliant formation of an argument! Completely a priori, so it stands on its own without any experiential proof.

Of course, it also could be used to argue that aliens are inhabiting our bodies without our knowledge, because a really successful alien attack would happen without anyone knowing about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument [wikipedia.org]