Dan Farber has a new home for his blog, Outside The Lines. I was reading it using the best Windows RSS reader, FeedDemon, this morning when I stumbled upon this little video by Lenovo that pokes fun of the MacBook Air. Funny stuff! It also reminded me that I needed to share my early impressions of this new device. First, it has been great to have it around since I am watching the Twenty20 cricket tournament that is going on in India right now.
Willow.tv only works on a PC and Internet Explorer, which is seriously lame. Still, it has forced me to use ThinkPad X300 for about four hours a day, and I can understand why people rave about solid-state hard drives. This machine (running Windows XP) is fast — and I mean fast — for basic computing (or the cloud computing tasks we typically do these days.) I wish I had a Macbook Air with SSD to do a one-on-one comparison.
My very quick take after spending a week with X300: If you are looking for an ultra-portable with a great keyboard, decent screen, you like using Windows XP and money is no object, then there is no way you can go wrong with x300. Automattic CEO Toni Schneider just got one.
It is funny that you brag about the speed of SSD compared to their magnetic brothers because my friends that test PC performance for a couple of Fortune 500 firms have shown me evidence that the speed improvement is minimal. Plus the power savings will only net 10 more minutes of battery life. I can get more life than that out of a battery by dimming the screen.
I am not impressed with SSD numbers considering their huge price disadvantage.
C. Garlson, I am comparing it with the HD Macbook Air and boy the difference is substantial in speed and power consumption.
Hum, been looking at it, to heavy though 🙂 Sony G1/G2 is super light, wish i bought it with SSD though, haven’t decided yet if i prefer the Sony or the previous Panasonic Notebooks i had, all under 2.2 pounds though.
Martin,
The best feature of this little puppy: keyboard. Amazingly usable for a ultra note.
Om you can watch cricket on t20.com or iplt20.com. They play on Firefox also.
Pity the X300 looks like ass. The Thinkpad design hasn’t been updated in YEARS and it doesn’t look good anymore! What doesn’t every single pc manufacturer apart from apple understand about ‘clean and simple design’?!!!
Om – it is not just cricket.. many live broadcasts/recordings of cricket/bollywood/kollywood play only in IE! I have always wondered why.. in the age of you-can-run-everything-with-your-browser.
@ Marcus,
Well, the design part… you got that right 🙂
Lame…how can you show a video of the macbook with lots of wires. So, I am to assume that the x300 has NO wires (power, mouse?). Yes, I agree that you need to hook up a disc player to the laptop…but come on, who uses that anymore (I have been using a x31/x61 for four years and have never used it).
Hey, I hear that the x300 is a nice computer, but let’s compare apples to apples. Show me the cables.
We’re having problems with the thinkpad cases we’ve been supplying. The stitching is unravelling.
Looking for feedback on good quality cases suitable for thinkpad laptops. Thanks