The ThinkPad x300 is finally available to users and if you have been following the tech news lately you surely know all about it by now. It’s a lightweight notebook with a LED-backlit 13.3″ display, with a Core 2 Duo processor that comes standard with a solid state drive. It sells for at least $2548 so it’s not cheap, but no one expected a release of this magnitude to be affordable, especially given how a 64GB SSD is going to inflate the price at this early stage in the game.
It’s thin (0.73-0.92″), it’s light (starting at 2.9lbs), and it has an optical drive, but what else should you know about the X300? You might already know the big stuff (like about that new Intel Core 2 Duo processor), but if you follow the ThinkPads as closely as many of us, then this article is for you. We will be going over all the tweaks that were made in order for the X300 to refresh our concept of what a ThinkPad is and what one can be. The full review should be available shortly with performance, battery, and usage testing, but in this article is going to focus on the design of the X300’s exterior as well as off of those small features that make a ThinkPad a ThinkPad.
For the most part the X300’s design is pure ThinkPad–it’s all matte black and the build is quite sturdy. Despite the light weight and slim profile it is almost totally free of flex and the feel is a lot more confidence-inspiring than the average notebook in this weight class. Rather than drop features, the 13.3″ notebook managed to integrated features from both X series and the larger T/R models, including a full-sized keyboard.
The X300 brings a lot of small changes that might go unnoticed but are actually quite interesting. One you can’t miss is a blue backlit ThinkVantage button above the keyboard. This entire area saw a minor change, and it now a glossy black material (it feels like plastic, but looks like aluminum) with three volume control buttons (mute, up, and down), LED indicators (WiFi, battery, etc.), and then the power button. The power button is now low-profile with a white LED behind it. That makes for two extra always-on lights, not that these are substantial power drains.
The palm rest was also redone for the X300. The most noticeable change here is that the X300 has dual cursor controls, just like the R and T models. The X series only has the red pointing stick and drops the trackpad in order to save space and deal with the limited depth of area in front of the keyboard. Another very small tweak to the controls is that the pointing stick’s mouse buttons have their red and blue lines back. The palm rest on the X300 also received a new material, it’s now a slightly grippy, rubber-like material instead of the classic ThinkPad’s slighty-textured hard plastic. The X300 has two speakers, instead of one, and moves them to the front corners of the notebooks, as opposed to the bottom or on the sides of the keyboard. Sound quality is improved from past X series models.
They keyboard is generously spaced and it easy to use–it is very much like what you would find on a notebook like the R61. They keys seem to have a new texture to them, as their surfaces feel more rubbery than before, though the key action was not changed. Also the caps lock has a green LED indicator in it, which is useful, and the side ports have little logos above them so you can find something like a USB port without bending over.
On the top cover of the notebook we see that same rubbery material as well as one addition, a set of LED indicators. Using these you can tell is the battery is running, if the notebook is charging, or if it’s hibernating, all without opening the notebook up. There is also a Lenovo logo on the cover that has not been there before. The notebook is held shut with a single latch.
In order to get a full set of external connectors on such a thin notebook the sides were tweaked. Now there are connectors on all three sides, which required a new battery design as the old ThinkPad battery took up the entire rear of the notebook. With the optical drive taking up most of the right side, we see two USB ports on the right side with the headphone/mic jack, and then a USB port, VGA-out, ethernet, and the wireless on/off switch on the rear. Thankfully the notebook has horizontal USB slots, not the vertical ones we have see used on some of ThinkPads recently.
From the left side you can open a panel (with a single screw) and get at the SSD. The SSD is a small metal unit, about the size of an ipod nano and connects to the system with SATA. It is extremely easy to remove if necessary.
There are still more changes on the underside of the notebook. The biggest is the battery, which is directly under the palm rest and while it can get thicker, it can’t get any larger. Under the battery is the slot for the SIM card in the case that you will be using wireless broadband, but the test model we have has Verizon WWAN. The battery is available in both a 3-cell and a 6-cell model. Also on the underside of the computer is a single panel that can easily be removed to get to the two memory slots as well as the wireless card. The memory is upgradeable from the 2GB (standard) to 4GB. The rubber feet on the bottom have been changed so that now there are soft inner feet and harder rubber pieces around them. This only appears on the notebook’s front feet and those on the battery.
The display will be covered more in the full review, but it’s a 13.3″ widescreen panel that runs natively at 1440×900. It is LED-backlit and it looks quite nice. At this point it does not seems like the best LED panel in production, but some more time is needed to get a full impression.
As for changes you can’t see, the X300 has everything you would expect, like Bluetooth and WiFi, but it also has GPS and wireless USB. Of course it has mobile broadband, which is a must for any high-end mobile system at this point. This test system arrived with Windows XP on it, not Vista.
All told, the X300 has a number of very interesting changes. It’s very much a ThinkPad but what we see in the X300 is an evolution of the X series into something that is a lot cooler, and a lot more expensive, than the X61s. Much of this cost is due to the 64GB SSD, but this is standard so we probably won’t see the price dropping any time soon. The X300 was never intended to be a notebook for everyone though; this is, to a certain extent, Lenovo showing off just what they can do and displaying the technology that will be trickling down to the rest of the line in the near future.
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We don’t usually take much stock in proposed legislation — Schoolhouse Rock left out the part where lobbyists gut all the good bits — but we’re willing to root for the Wireless Consumer Protection and Community Broadband Empowerment Act, currently on the floor in the House and Senate. The bill, sponsored by Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey, would require carriers to sell contract-free phones, provide rate plan information in a “clear, plain, and conspicuous manner,” disclose any phone subsidies hidden in the plan’s price, and offer price-comparable plans with no subsidy or early termination fee. That means you’d finally know exactly how much a plan would bill you every month including taxes and fees, it’d be easier to see how much devices like the iphone are marked up, and most importantly, it’d be way easier to switch carriers to get better deals. The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, of which Markey is the chairman, held a hearing on the bill this morning with reps from both the wireless industry and consumer groups present, so progress is being made — we’ll see how things go.
While its claim of being the “first” to offer an OS specifically designed for the latest crop of low-cost laptops and UMPCs may be a little dubious, the unfortunately-named Linpus is at least pretty quick to jump on the bandwagon. To that end, the company’s just let loose its Linpus Linux Lite OS, which it says will run just fine on laptops like the Eee PC and Cloudbook, or any other system with as little as a 500MHz CPU, 128MB of RAM and 512MB of storage. Just as importantly, the OS is also apparently designed with low-res 7-inch screens in mind, although as CLUMPC points out, it doesn’t go so far as to include support for little things like built-in WiFi out of the box. Still, if you want to give it a shot, you can grab it now in the form of a Live CD direct from Linpus.
PC World reviews the Motorola Q Global and writes, “The Q has a built-in 2-megapixel camera with lots of menu controls, including image resolution, brightness, white balance, flash, and up to 8X digital zoom. But I was disappointed in the images I captured: Even those that looked good on the Q’s much smaller screen were grainy and fuzzy on my PC.”
Apple has released the 1.1.4 software update for the iPhone, listing “bug fixes” in the change notes. Surprisingly, one bug it neglected to fix is the ability to Jailbreak the iPhone. Jailbreaking is the name of a hack to allow access to the iPhone and 