Thinkpad X300 first impressions

Just received a new Thinkpad X300. Unfortunately, it's not for myself, so it will be gone again after I have set it up.

A few months ago, there was a lot of hype about the Macbook Air, mainly due to the traditionally excellent Apple marketing (after all, there had been small and light notebooks for years like the Toshiba R500 or the whole Thinkpad X series, so I failed to see what was so special about the Air other than all the things it was missing).

The Thinkpad X300 looks like the Air (almost) done right: DVD drive, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB ports and VGA out, all things missing from the Air, should make it a quite usabe machine. However, just like the Air, it still seems a special purpose machine, not a standard notebook for everyday use. Other than being overly expensive, it has a few serious limitations like a very small (solid state) disk of 64 GB and unlike it's older brothers no Firewire port or Compact Flash reader built-in and no PCMCIA or Express Card slot. On the other hand, it does have a DVD drive which the other X series are missing.

Installing Debian seems a bit complicated for now to have everything working right. But the notebook came with an XP Professionnal CD to replace the pre-installed Vista.

A suivre...

(Another rant about the Macbook Air: http://www.irishurls.com/blog/2008/01/16/macbook-air-rant/)