After a few weeks of ownership I feel now confident enough to report my experience with my new laptop. One thing at the beginning - it's a thinkpad like we are used to them: well processed in a robust chassis.
The aim of this listing is not to provide hard technical facts (these can be found in benchmarks elsewhere) but to show my personal sight of the product.
Display
PRO:
resolution is high enough and with 96 dpi fonts are perfect readable
backlight intensity is good enough for normal environment
the hinge is robust and i like the gimmick to rotate it in both directions
CONTRA:
the surface is (of course) made for usage with the pen and slight glossy and has therefore tends to reflect.
in tablet mode the display tends to waggle because the locking is not tight enough.
Batterie
PRO:
I've bought the 8 cell battery and I am able to use the laptop up to 7 hours under linux with normal brightness and without doing any special hacks. That's really OK for me.
in difference to the X200s the bigger battery is as wide as the notebook chassis itself and therefore doesn't bother in any way. I can really recommend usage of the 8 cell battery.
Keyboard
PRO:
it's impressive how good the keyboard feels like on this really small notebook
full size buttons a lot of extra buttons for all the really cute ACPI features.
Performance
PRO:
- HDD is very silent and I am even a bit impressed about the performance.
hdparm output:
denkbrett ~ # hdparm -T -t /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 7898 MB in 1.99 seconds = 3961.38 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 192 MB in 3.02 seconds = 63.57 MB/sec
CONTRA:
- I'd say performance is as expected for this kind of low power CPU.
glibc compilation:
mueli@denkbrett events % genlop -t glibc
* sys-libs/glibc
Sat Mar 21 06:54:21 2009 >>> sys-libs/glibc-2.8_p20080602-r1
merge time: 55 minutes and 33 seconds.
Features I really like
I like out of the box linux support. That's the case for WLAN, graphics, ACPI (yes ACPI really works on lenovo thinkpad notebooks
), suspend, tablet function (wacom driver), sound and
trackpoint. I didn't need the WWAN card, bluetooth and the
fingerprint reader yes - therefore no experience on that.xrandr 1.2 support of the intel graphics works really good. I am able to use two 19" TFT connected to my docking station. You want be able to do that on windows because the intel graphics chip has only 2 CRTCs and therefore you have to turn of the LVDS display of the notebook itself.
docking station (no more words on that
)the really small power adapter
low weight of the notebook
the x200t is very silent - I'd say you can't hear it during normal operation