the Onda

The blogosphere has been a wonderful source of product recommendations for me. I've found coffee machines, books, rock bands, movies, and open source tools just to name a few. And by in large I am always really happy with the pointers. They keep me subscribed to around 200 feeds, 20 of which I listen to very carefully.

Which is why when I needed a PC laptop, I chose one of the new IBM Thinkpad X41 tablets. It's been a long time since a PC laptop has excited me in any meaningful way (the first z505 VAIOs did and before that the Thinkpad 560 which was the Powerbook of its day) and I figured that "tablet experience" might get me there. After listening to Scoble continually praising both Windows XP Tablet and the "Experience Pack," I decided to take the plunge. I chose IBM (or Lenovo rather) because they've always made the sturdiest and in my opinion best overall laptops. I figured the 6 week wait was because of how awesome these things were.

I finally got the machine two days ago and I have to say, if first impressions count towards long-term product-love, this is going to be a short and bumpy relationship. The out-of-the-box experience with the X41 Tablet is so bad that it can only be compared to the experience of setting up one of those $400 Dells (except you don't feel like you've gotten a "deal").

Brief impressions (after two days) follow, hoping that some future Googler runs across this amidst the sea of accolades about the machine (see: Stockholm Syndrome below). I will write more as I use it and hope that it ends up being more positive than this. But here is my first impression: do not buy this thing. Get one of the small Sonys, the Toshibas, whatever else and wait yet another rev on this tablet stuff. Better yet, if you care about the pleasure of using a good laptop, buy an Apple (iBook or Powebook).

Impressions

Apple has an intern who works in packaging at some heinous building in the back of DeAnza where they keep all of the ex-Newton gimps. This intern is not terribly bright; in fact she drools in meetings and likes digging into her ear with half-dismembered paperclips. That said, Lenovo would do well to steal her away (at the grossly overpaid rate of say $20/hr) to put her in charge of all product packaging. If you could take the inverse of the experience of opening a new iPod, opening an X41 Tablet is it. It may seem like a stupid thing to focus on-- the fact that Lenovo sent me so many plain cardboard boxes inside of other plain cardboard boxes that at the end on the unpacking I was convinced someone was knocking off those infinitely nested Russian dolls. By the time I got to the machine, my desk looked like a hobo community for smurfs.

Then you get to the machine itself. Now, part of what I read about online was how small the X41 feels, "almost like a real notebook." Yeah, right. The machine is about the size of a 12 inch laptop-- from 1995. The actual body is about normal thickness but the screen is the laptop's equivalent of Mr. Magoo glasses and the whole hinge mechanism makes the machine look like a door jamb. PC Magazine said that this was the first convertible (tablet) that just felt like laptop when it's in laptop mode. I might agree if they had said that it was the first convertible that feels like an ugly cumbersome laptop. Outside of the overall dimensions, the screen has way too much bevel around it (probably due to the inherent design limitations imposed by the touchscreen) and nine heinous buttons across the bottom of the bevel that were designed to be pressed by both fingers and the stylus. And to boot, each button has an ugly icon which is 90 degrees rotated when you are in plain laptop mode.

Let me get on to the substantive stuff. But before I do, a caveat. I have not used a PC laptop seriously since 2003 when I got an IBM Thinkpad T40. So this is where my complaints might have more to do with Microsoft (and the unbelievable proposition that Windows XP seems to be getting slower) than with IBM per se.

After the first power-on, the computer spends at least 5 minutes doing some sort of image copy setting itself up for first use. I guess the IBM product people were not taught about getting the user to that first moment of joy as quickly as possible. After the grinding of the HD is done, you're hit with a bunch of EULAs but since this is a pretty crumby part of most Wintel setup experiences, I'll just fast forward 20 or so minutes and 2 or 3 reboots to the first usable screen...which was a broken browser window with an internal C:* reference. I think it was something to highlight the features of the Tablet PC but I can't be sure. Again, why such little attention to first impressions?

When you get a pen computer, the first thing you want to do is... well use the pen. Windows XP Tablet edition gives you little clue as to how to do this. There is an additional Tablet icon in the Quicklaunch toolbar (disabled by default) which brings up a kludgey keyboard for tapping and some additional Programs in the Start Menu but outside of that it looks just like Windows XP. I guess this is what Windows people love (running the same interface/apps on anything from a cellphone to a workstation) but in my case it just reminds me that I've got a device which is not as good at being a laptop as a T43 would have been. There are Tablet specific applications (called the "Experience Pack") but only time will tell whether these are really useful. I have high hopes for "Snipping Tool," a program that lets you cut out and annotate anything that is displayed on the screen and the Paint program looks fun, but I'll have to write more after I've played a bit more with all of it.

One final initial software note: since I got my last PC laptop the world decided that Windows viruses were just too much of a problem and it seems like every computer I've seen recently comes with a 3-month version of Norton Antivirus. This seems like a good idea except for the fact that the program is such a pain in the ass in its constant warnings and fairly cryptic messages about "taking over" various functions normally performed by Windows. It also seems to present a performance tax to the overall experience, especially at boot time. I know that Microsoft is going to fix this with Vista but in the meantime, it's a real drag on the whole user experience.

And speaking of performance, the X41 feels sluggish. I have a gig of RAM in it and the standard 1.5Ghz CPU. I come from the Apple world where OS 10.4's Finder combined with pokey PPC G4 chips defines a new molasses standard. And yet, the X41 Tablet still feels like it wants to do a few million digits of PI every once in a while, especially when booting any of the tablet-specific applications. Yuk.

Stay tuned for further thoughts on the whole "tablet experience." For example, the battery (for weight reasons I got the standard one) seems to drain at a pretty nice clip. I would anticipate (though I haven't tested it) that I'd get 2.5 hours on one charge without sticking on the 8-cell battery which makes the machine feel and look like it has a tumor.

I will close this initial impressions review by observing that that my impressions run against the grain of what other X41 Tablet owners are saying. Google it and you will see that most people are experiencing a high degree of product love for their X41s. To me (at this point), this seems like some sort of Microsoft Stockholm syndrome combined with a dearth of good alternatives in PC laptop-land. Or maybe Apple laptops have rotted me to the core.

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