A touchpad on a ThinkPad

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta, zatni@cbn.net.id

Despite recent data from IDC that shows worldwide sales for all PC-makers were down by 0.5 percent year-on-year last quarter, there has been quite an avalanche of new notebooks. In the past few months alone, I have received almost a dozen newly released notebooks, some of which I simply returned to their distributors and dealers because there was nothing of interest about them to discuss.

Actually, I was a bit hesitant about reviewing yet another notebook this week for fear that I would bore you all, and lead you to think that I work for the notebook-makers. However, when IBM Indonesia offered me the chance to spend a week playing around with their new ThinkPad T30, I could not resist the opportunity. After all, there are a number of interesting and innovative features on this notebook that deserve a closer look.

On July 17, Big Blue announced the launch of two new notebook series in Indonesia. They were the T30 Series and the new R32 Series. The "economy model" of the latter has a price tag as low as US$1,099, and it is intended for notebook buyers with a limited budget, such as SME owners, students and teachers. I just hope that the R32 is not going to turn out to be another short- lived ThinkPad 300 Series. Big Blue has traditionally done a terrific job in making high-end notebooks, but has not had much success with low-cost ones.

* Not really thin and light

Compared to the ASUS S1 and M2 Series notebooks that I reviewed in the past, the ThinkPad T30 is slightly heavier and thicker. Needless to say, it has the best keyboard that I have found on a notebook, and it has a superb 14.1-inch display screen.

Other features include a DVD and CD-RW combo drive, a built-in Bluetooth receiver, an IBM security chip, a Pentium 4 M processor running at 1.8 GHz, an ATI Mobile Radeon graphics subsystem with 16 MB of graphics memory, 256 MB of DDR RAM, a ThinkLight to illuminate the keyboard if you work in total darkness, the air cushion for the hard disk that I mentioned in my previous article and the new UltraNav multipointing system that we will examine later.

Of course, it also comes with other common amenities such as a built-in modem, an Ethernet port, three audio ports, two PC-Card slots -- which I think are less and less important these days -- and two USB ports.

By the way, I managed to crack the top of my own Toshiba Satellite 100 notebook a few years ago when I carelessly placed a tall stack of reading material on top of it. The notebook still works, but I have to be extra careful when opening it. I will have to have it replaced someday when I find someone who can make use of it.

Now, this new ThinkPad T30 has a protruding lip around the LCD screen and a strong titanium cover that would prevent a similar fate from befalling it. In fact, IBM boasts that a person weighing about 100 kilogram can stand on top of the notebook without breaking it. I would have liked to have tested that myself, but unfortunately I weigh 104 kilograms and I am not sure whether this demo unit was covered by IBM's three-year warranty.

* A choice of pointing devices

Surprise, surprise! Finally, we see a ThinkPad with a touchpad. However, Big Blue did not merely pick any old touchpad out there and place it on the notebook's palm rest. Together with Synaptics, the leading maker of touchpads, it designed the touchpad to work together with the TrackPoint pointing device. This has resulted in a great multipointing device, because either has its own advantages. I like the touchpad because I can navigate around the screen more easily and more quickly with it than with the TrackPoint. However, to move a selected screen object around or to create a line in CorelDraw!, the TrackPoint is definitely more useful.

Incidentally, the IBM keyboard I am using at this very moment to write this article on my desktop PC also has a TrackPoint. It works well with the Logitech optical mouse that is connected to my PC via the USB port. I have a touchpad on my six-year-old Siemens Nixdorf notebook, which I like very much, so my right hand is quite familiar with the three different types of pointing devices.

Now, back to the new ThinkPad. IBM calls the new TrackPoint and touchpad combination "UltraNav". A quick search on the Internet actually revealed that the name UltraNav was already being used by an Australian company for its flight planning software. Uh-oh, there may be a legal problem arising from this choice of name, unfortunately.

Litigation aside, the touchpad has also added two more buttons to the pointing device. The two new buttons underneath the touchpad can be set to perform different functions other than just the left and right mouse buttons, including to run macros or to launch specific applications.

The UltraNav setup wizard lets us choose either the TrackPoint or the touchpad as the primary pointing device. We can choose both, which I strongly recommend. But if you choose to use the TrackPoint only, you can use the four corners of the touchpad panel as four extra buttons to do different things, including running macros.

The sensitivity of the touchpad can also be adjusted, and so can the Palm Check to avoid having the screen cursor jump around if you accidentally place your palm on top of the touchpad panel. The center button of the TrackPoint can be set either to lock a screen to the cursor to scroll up and down with the TrackPoint or to invoke the magnifier.

What are the other things that I like about this notebook? It comes with software utilities to backup data, to copy CDs and to create your own CDs and CD-ROMs. If something happens to the Windows XP, you can restore everything to factory condition by pressing F11 during boot up.

When it comes to performance, the notebook simply gives us no reason to complain. The only item on my wish list is that I had the more than $3,000 to buy this great notebook. If your company has plans to upgrade the notebook fleet of its executives, insist on getting this one.

* Anti-theft device from Caveo

Not related to IBM in any way, a company named Caveo (www.caveo.com) offers a PC Card that will produce a lot of noise when it detects motion. The $99 Caveo Anti-Theft PC Card will play a WAV file at an increasing volume to attract attention. So if you are in a seminar and have to leave the room during a coffee break, you can confidently leave your notebook on the desk as long as you remember to arm the device.

The problem is, you may still end up losing your notebook if a thief picks it out, is startled by the screeching alarm and throws it to the floor as he runs out of the room. Still, it can be an effective security device. You can place a bold notice next to your notebook that reads, "This notebook will sound a loud alarm if moved," right?