IBM ThinkPad X
X Series Basic Specification: 500MHz Intel Mobile Celeron 64MB Ram, 10GB hard drive 12.1in screen with 800 x 600 resolution, built-in V.90 modem Weight: 1.4kg Price (including VAT): £1,567.45 (with Windows 98SE) or £1,643.83 (with Windows 2000)
Most people think the IBM ThinkPad X is sleek and amazingly neat, except me. Well, it is roughly the size of an office diary, and barely an inch thick. Not bad for an ultraportable with a 500MHz Intel Celeron or Pentium III. It only looks big to me because it is noticeably bigger than the machine it is designed to replace: the ultraportable ThinkPad 240.
The 240 has become a classic, if that term can be applied to something with a shelf life of about 18 months. However, like the old IBM Butterfly keyboard, which extended, it has become a victim of the onward march of flat-screen technology. The X Series is bigger because it has a 12.1in colour LCD, whereas the 240 could only manage 10.4in.
Unfortunately, the X as tested does not derive any particular benefit from the extra screen estate. Both machines run Windows with a resolution of only 800 by 600 pixels in 16-bit colour. As a result, you cannot see any more on the screen, it just looks a bigger - though at least you can buy an X Series with a 1024 by 768 resolution screen, which is not available on the 240.
The larger screen size also makes room for a full-size keyboard and about a dozen extra keys. Again, however, the practical benefits are rather small, and both keyboards suffer from a few odd key placings. On the X Series, the most annoying is the Esc key, which is positioned above F1 instead of next to it. It is annoying to hit the F1 (Windows Help) key at all: hitting it several times a day becomes infuriating.
Oddly, IBM has still not managed to find room for a Windows key. Even more oddly, there's no key to turn on the X's novel light, which is built in to the lid to illuminate the keyboard. There are three keys to operate the speaker (volume up, down and mute), but to turn the light on you have to press the Function and Page Up keys together.
Where the X Series thrashes the 240 is in expandability, which is important in machines that do not have built-in floppy and CD-rom drives. Both can take port replicators. However, the X Series also has a neat bus connector on the underside, to mate with the optional UltraBase X2 Media Slice. This locks securely to the bottom and adds a floppy drive, a device bay, two stereo speakers, and a number of ports. The device bay can hold a CD-Rom, CD-RW or DVD-Rom drive, a 250MB Zip or LS-120 floppy, a second hard drive or an extra battery. But, instead of a stripped-down ultraportable, the result is a full-spec machine at a heavy price. And if that's what you want, you can buy something better and cheaper, even within IBM's current three ranges of ThinkPads.
Nevertheless, I'm sure IBM is right. Today's buyers want bigger, higher-resolution screens, and they want full-sized keyboards. They also want expandable notebooks because many are now buying them as their main machine, not as adjuncts to desktop models. However, if you are the sort of oddball who wants a dinky little portable that will go almost anywhere, the ThinkPad 240 will do nicely. But buy now, because stocks are unlikely to last.
