First impression with the X61 Tablet

Finally it's in my hands. Spent a few hours to set it up, not as I have dreaded. In the past, I have do a fresh installation of windows from scratch for every single one of the computer I got. This time, I want to give them a chance to "prove" themselves after so many years: they can make a computer that do not needs much TLC. Now it's more or less okay to run with the exception of a few minor incompatibility issues with Vista that I need to find a solution later. Here are some initial impressions:

Size:
The build is solid, may be too much. It's much heavier thank the old X31. Part of the reason is the large hard drive and cooling for the core duo CPU. Being a tablet, a lot of functionalities have been integrated into the LCD package, e.g. power, scrolling, screen orientation switching, etc. Hence, the edge of the screen is significantly wider than X31 and X41.

Another thing is that the battery sticks out in the back (as seen in the top of the figure) like some extended life batteries in other notebooks.


Tablet:
The rotation of the LCD is steady, functioning as expected. Handwritten recognition works exceptionally well for regular words, but not so much for intentionally miss spelled words or anything not in its vocabulary.

Temperature:
It is COOOOOOL. All three of the Dell Latitude series laptops I used before are very hot including the fairly recent D420. Even comparing to the X31, it is considerablely cooler. Nice feature when using it in hot weather on my lap with just shorts. There is heat coming from the bottom, but more distributed than the Dells that concentrated in a very small area. This should mostly attribute to the excellent design by Lenovo/IBM engineers and Intel for their new generation of low voltage dual core Centrino processors.

Program/Vista:
Again, Lenovo/IBM packed a lot of utilities in the pre-installed Vista Ultimate. Some are very useful such as the Diskeeper, Power Management, Access Connections, etc. It also contains a lot of programs I have no idea of preloaded when windows starting up. I have no prior hands-on experiences with Vista, may be need to wait for a few weeks before commenting too much on it.