Good news for ThinkPad fans: You can now have your notebook and your tablet PC, too. Lenovo’s $2059 ThinkPad X41 Tablet, the company’s first portable based on Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, is a svelte convertible that fully lives up to ThinkPad’s proud design heritage.
The X41 and Motion Computing’s new $2439 LE1600 Tablet PC are among the first tablets to use Intel’s latest mobile technology to stay slim without sacrificing much performance.
The two tablets are similar in many ways. Both carry Intel’s 1.5-GHz Pentium M LV 758 processor, one of the centerpieces of Intel’s next-generation mobile platform, code-named Sonoma; both run Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, the latest version of the tablet operating system; and both have fingerprint scanners with biometric security software and 12.1-inch active-matrix LCD digitizer screens. Each model also features built-in 802.11g Wi-Fi and a full complement of connectors (two USB 2.0 ports, ethernet and phone jacks, and SD and PC Card slots).
Beyond these similarities, Motion Computing’s preproduction LE1600 Tablet PC edged out our shipping ThinkPad X41 Tablet in most respects. However, the ThinkPad left the LE1600 in the dust in our battery life tests: It ran for a solid 5 hours, 1 minute, considerably outdoing the LE1600’s time of 3 hours, 3 minutes.
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