Second impressions: Lenovo x60 Tablet

After being sick the last couple of days, I got back in to work today and decided to finish my impressions piece for the x60.

Last week, I allowed my 3-year-old to use the x60's touch input feature. I immediately noticed that the screen shows skin oils very well. Cleaning the screen will have to be re-trained in me because I'm used to being able to rub the screen with a cleaning cloth while it's running. But the x60's digitizer is resistive, so the first couple of times I tried to wipe away my 3-year-old's fingerprints, I ended up with extra strokes on my Journal notes.

I can also understand now why BusinessWeek's Stephen Wildstrom didn't have good things to say about touch input. He hasn't had the pleasure of working with capacitive digitizers yet. The touch input features are not optimal on resistive digitizers, but it's certainly better than not having touch at all.

In my first impressions article, I bemoaned how the biometric processor didn't have drivers yet - voila! Lenovo has them now. Just ran the System Update utility and snagged another 716MB of updates for system drivers/utilities alone. Now I'll get to use the biometric logon at least for my non-corporate work. Microsoft policy prohibits use of biometric scanning as the sole authentication to the corporate network.

The battery life has been excellent. My system has the 8-cell extended battery and my experience so far has been that I can easily get 6 hours of life with the wireless on and connected.

My stated goal for this x60 is to replace my work desktop machine. That won't be too hard, since it is a P4 2.4Ghz, 1GB, 120GB HDD. I do have 2@ LCDs connected to the desktop, which I will kind of miss because no matter how you look at it, the x60's 12.1" display next to a 20" LCD in portrait mode is not the same as two 20" LCDs next to each other in portrait mode.

post script:
We're working on another issue of CoDe Focus Magazine! I've been helping to review articles and I have even contributed one of my own this time, Introduction to Touch Technology in Windows Vista.

Please take a look at the magazine when it comes out and let me know what you think!