Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Well, it’s been about a month and a half since I ordered a Santa Rosa-based ThinkPad X61 Tablet from Lenovo. I took advantage of their Father’s Day sale and got one tricked out with the following components.
X61 Tablet 7764-CTO
1.6Ghz Intel Core2 Duo
2GB DDR2 667 RAM
100GB/7200RPM/8MB Hitachi TravelStar hard drive
12 inch SXGA+ (1400×1050) display with SuperView
Intel 802.11a/b/g/n wireless
1GB Intel TurboMemory card
Intel X3100 Integrated Graphics (with actual hardware texture and lighting!)

I also picked up an X6 series dock so I could have an optical drive to install stuff with. The X series machines are a one spindle design, so they lack built-in optical drives.

Sadly, the hard drive died about eight hours after I got the machine, long enough for me to get a full backup of my de-crapified system before it died on me. Apparently there was a defective batch of Hitachi TravelStars that went out of the factory. Lenovo support was extremely helpful and kind; they shipped me a new 100GB drive via FedEx Next Day Air (should be here Tuesday). I stole the 60GB drive out of my ThinkPad T60 so I could continue to play around with everything. It’s the same as the 100GB in all respects except for capacity. I should put in a good word for the Rescue and Recovery software that Lenovo ships in all their machines, as it is an extremely useful tool. I was back up and running (once I found my burned recovery CDs so that I could load the backup image off my USB hard drive) about 20 minutes after I shoved the T60’s drive in. I backed that up to the TerraStation so I’ll be able to restore the T60 later on.

But enough about the hard drive, let’s get on with the review!

This is the X61 in notebook mode. It’s got the same awesome keyboard as the rest of the ThinkPad line, albeit a bit smaller to accommodate the reduced footprint of the machine. Due to the size, there’s no touchpad, but the TrackPoint is there. The build quality on my unit is excellent with the sole exception of the ‘bottom’ bezel on my screen. The adhesive didn’t set properly, so it was pulling back a bit when I got the machine. There seems to be a lot of stress on that frame, because it didn’t want to stay down with some casually applied pressure. I clamped down on it with my fingers for five minutes or so, and it’s definitely not lifting as much as it was.

I should put in a word about the screen options for the X61 here, because you can choose from three screens (all 12″):

The downside to the SuperView panel (what I got), as you can probably see, is that milky film that forms from your skin oils on the display. Liquids only make it worse (even the KlearScreen solution that I love so dearly), and dry cloths don’t remove it all. The best thing I’ve found is to buff vigorously with a microfiber cloth, which smears it out. You can’t tell that the film is there when the screen is on unless there’s two or three hours of “use-buildup” on the panel, so don’t worry too much. I saw the 1024×768 panels in other reviews, and I can tell you that the 1400×1050 resolution display is undoubtedly superior. As an aside to Matt, I should say that Wordpress’s themes work magnificently in portrait mode.

The X3100 integrated graphics (the mobile version of the X3000) are a step above and beyond Intel’s former solutions, even including hardware-based texture and lighting and 8 unified shaders…except the drivers that enable the T&L features aren’t available for Vista yet, and only in crappy pre-beta form for XP. I’ll let you know how games perform on it once I can actually tap the chip’s full potential.

EDIT: Well, fancy that. I guess T&L+vertex shader enabled drivers are available for XP and Vista. Testing later!

Moving on…

My apologies that the picture is dark, but even sans built-in optical drive, the X61 comes well equipped with ports. On the right here is a mini-Firewire port, two USB 2.0 ports, your microphone and stereo jacks, the hard drive bay, modem, power, and a security lock hole.

The left side boasts a heatpipe vent, a USB 2.0 port, VGA, gigabit Ethernet, a PCMCIA (no ExpressCard makes Kyle sad) slot, a SecureDigital Slot below that, and the silo for the stylus.

I’ll see what I can do about showing off some of the ink-oriented applications at a future date, after I’ve figured them out. Just for kicks, here’s the Vista Ultimate logon screen. The items down the side include the fingerprint reader, a D-Pad for scrolling (with an enter button in the middle), an Escape button, a mystery button (haven’t pushed it yet), the screen rotate button, and a lockable power switch. The lump sticking out from the side is the now-standard 8-cell extended battery. I can get around 5.5 hours with Wifi and Bluetooth disabled, 4 hours with them on. This is with brightness on the maximum allowable setting for battery power and the power profile in “Thinkpad Default mode. There’s a Battery Stretch feature that shuts off various components on the machine to try and get you that last lick of power (say, while watching a particularly long movie) in a pinch, but I haven’t been able to test it yet.

Performance-wise, this thing is a screamer. Not only does it knock the socks off the previous X60 Tablet line, the hard drive has been upgraded from a 1.8 inch design (sips power, terrible performance) to a slightly more power hungry 2.5 inch, industry standard design. It’s plenty fast with 2GB of RAM, and supports up to 4GB with dual 2GB DIMMs installed. I’m not sure what kind of impact the Intel TurboMemory is having, as I don’t have a non-TurboMemory unit to test with. One caveat: the slot for the TurboMemory card is the same as the one used for the WWAN option (via Verizon Wireless or Cingular), so you can’t have both. Also, I hear that the WWAN models have another nubby antenna on the top of the screen.

Actual tablet performance is excellent. The Wacom active digitizer is very accurate, much more so than any passive digitizer I’ve ever used. Vista has improved the handwriting recognition engine substantially; not only is it more accurate overall, it learns your handwriting and vocabulary as you write. In addition, there is a ‘training’ program available that you can provide with both writing and alike-character (S and 2, for example) samples to allow the engine to better understand your personal style.

If you get one of the X series machines, I highly recommend investing in the X6 series dock. It’s not as nice as the crazy ones on the T and older X40 series models, but it has an UltraBay slot for an optical or second hard drive and various legacy ports.

The right side of the dock includes the UltraBay and a Kensington. That’s ANOTHER lockable power button on the front there.

The left side features another security lock, two USB 2.0 ports, and the eject lever.

Legacy ports galore! Modem, Ethernet, microphone, and stereo passthroughs are there, in addition to parallel, serial, and VGA ports as well as two USB 2.0 ports and a power plug.

If there’s any other questions I can answer, please don’t hesitate to ask! I can also update the review after-the-fact to make sure I have all my bases covered.

-Kyle