IBM ThinkPad X41 Ultraportable Announced

Spring is in the air, meaning it's time for daffodils, baseball season and new ultraportable notebook computer releases. Dell kicked off the season with the Latitude X1 release, and IBM follows with the announcement of the ThinkPad X41. The X41 follows upon the highly successful ThinkPad X40 notebook, keeping the weight at 2.7lbs but increasing processor speed to 1.50 GHz via an Intel Pentium M processor.

IBM ThinkPad X41 (view larger image)

The new X41willintegrate the same biometric fingerprint reader capabilities it's big brother the ThinkPad T43 has. Instead of putting the finger swipe reader off to the right hand side though, the X41 will have it in the middle where a touchpad is often found on other notebooks.

The new ThinkPad X41 is equipped with an IntelPentium M1.50GHz processorwith 400MHz front side bus (FSB) and 2MB of L2 cache. The graphics capabilities for the X41 will be delivered viathe Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900. ThinkPad X41 includes the ThinkPad Power Manager, a utility thatallows users to have control over the thermal management of their notebook PC, specifically the processor speed and the speed of the fan that cools the processor.

To keep weight down on this 12.1" screen laptop there is nobuilt-in optical drive, butthe X41 isdesigned to work with the optional X4 UltraBase Dock, which provides an additional expansion option for mobile workers while bringing the combined weight to only 4 pounds. With the X4 UltraBase Dock, people have the flexibility ofusing UltraBay Slim devices such as additional batteries, a CD or DVD optical drive, added media options and increased storage capacity.

The new ultraportable ThinkPad X41 notebook will be available on April 12 through www.ibm.com and select IBM Business Partners. Prices for the ThinkPad X41 start at $1,999. For more information, see www.ibm.com/thinkpad.

 

With all this power in a tiny body, the X41 will be very popular with those who have the budget for it. In my time with a pre-production unit, I was very impressed. I just wish they could find a way to get an optical drive in there. I'd give up half a pound for that alone.

Brian

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I still cannot understand why IBM insist on not having a touchpad on their X series. I have no idea how they manage to use all of the depth of a 12" without a pad (this is still a 12" right? no mention of screen size in article!), I mean sony's and fujitsu's wide 10.6" which have significantly less depth still manage a decent keyboard and a pad.

I could never get used to the stick, and I get frustrated using it in a matter of minutes. I mean really frustrated!

Q: abaxter, what is the resolution of the screen? still the same as the current?

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N6010: P4M 3.2G, 512MB Dual 333MHz, 60GB 7200RPM, ATI 9700M, 17" WXGA+
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I was wondering if the x41 is the only new thinkpad that IBM is releasing in April...Other posts made it sound that IBM was releasing a tablet pc based off the x41 sometime in April or May...Any thoughts on this?

Jonathan

 

The screen size is 12.1" (sorry) and yes it is the same as the X40 as far as resolution, XGA (1024x768).

As far as Tablet PC rumor based on X41, we can only comment on what IBM has announced.

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Will there possibly be an upgrade ofthe current capacity of the X40's harddrive??