Since it's apparently impossible for me to keep a laptop longer than six months, I am now the semi-proud owner of a ThinkPad X100e. This is part of what I'm calling Lenovo's "experimental" line, joining forces with the ThinkPad Edge. How are these experimental? Well, they have far fewer LEDs, to start. They don't have the rubberized paint applied to them. They have curves and bevels. They look like they were designed some time in the last ten years. This is new territory for the ThinkPad lineup, and I applaud the effort, though I miss my ThinkLight (but love that there's still a TrackPoint).

What is the X100e? This is the first 'netbook' type of ThinkPad, but it skirts the edge of the former 'subnotebook' classification. Instead of a 10" 1024x600 display, it's an 11.6" 1366x768 display, and instead of a single core Atom, there is a dual core Athlon Neo L625 hiding inside. You also get a Radeon HD 3200 instead of GMA 500 or something equally lame, so it's a very peppy, portable little machine. I really dig it.



The hardware is mostly good. It has the hard drive protection system, that kills the spindle when acceleration or movement is detected. The keyboard, though a departure from previous ThinkPad models by being more Sony/Apple style, is fantastic, with beveled and differently shaped keys with great spring action compared to the MacBook I had before. The multitouch trackpad is generously sized for the small footprint of the machine, and the TrackPoint buttons are large and easy to find. Getting access to PCIe and memory is much easier (if that was possible) than easier models, with six screws to remove on the back panel before the whole thing comes off.

Two things stand out as ridiculously horrible, though. First off, the wireless card, manufactured by Realtek. I had been conditioned that "ThinkPad Wireless" was a nice Atheros card, as it's been since the T4x series, and was elated to see it on the order sheet. When it arrived, it was a Realtek 8192SE bgn card, with awful signal, an unstable connection, and was even more worthless in Linux with dropped connections and crashes using WPA2 Enterprise. I waited for a month for anything to improve, but obviously Realtek doesn't care at all, so I managed to find an Intel 5100 abgn card, in half height, Lenovo-branded form, for a very small price on eBay. I am now enjoying semi-reliable wireless, which is better than nothing. Second is the battery life. You'd think with a fuel-sipping-in-comparison-to-a-C2D Athlon Neo and a six cell battery, you would get more than three hours of battery life. Haha! No, fool, you get three hours if you're lucky! It seems weird that I got better life out of my 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro than this machine, but at least I have something that approaches portable.

I've been trying to use Linux on this machine, as my primary development language is Perl, and having a UNIX environment is really handy. I use it at work, but I have very defined tasks, so it's easy to deal with, especially compared to Windows XP. For my home laptop, the variables get bigger. My Mac OS X desktop machine acts as my primary, with my photos, music, and all of the data I've ever collected, where my laptop just becomes a satellite machine, so it gets a little easier. That said, I have to use VMware to use Office 2010, as OpenOffice sucks. I'm stuck using Thunderbird as a mail client, which has improved significantly over the years, but is still crippled by horrible, focus stealing UI. Media players aren't great, though they're improving, too. I also can't do Cocoa development on it anymore, not that I've had any time. I don't have any serious complaints, I think I'm just used to OS X still, and can't get over not using it. If Apple realizes some day that some people want more portability (that you can install your own software on and has a keyboard, ffs), or more resolution (take that screen from the iPhone 4, put about 16 of them in a laptop), maybe I'll go back to them for hardware.

Or, maybe Haiku will become useful. :)

Not entirely sure why I wrote this entry. Maybe I just needed to talk it out.