I have already confessed a love of gadgets. My preference is for good ones that solve my needs and are cool.

My main laptop for the last few years has been an instance of the superb Dell D800 series. (The D810 fixes many of the niggling issues with the original D800.) For heavy weight tasks like development, product demos, Visio diagrams and so on it’s a great choice.

Earlier this year I found myself needing access to my calendar and contacts instantly without opening my laptop. I was doing a lot of schlepping around the campus of a athletic gear company here in the Pacific North West. I purchased the very cool iPaq HX4700. It handled my needs very well for instant calendar and contacts, but increasingly I longed for full PC functionality in a lightweight machine.

I have been watching the tablet space for the last few years and had been sitting on the sidelines waiting for an offering I found compelling. Unless a gadget has a feature that really hits my need I generally wait a generation for things to mature. This summer when Lenovo introduced the ThinkPad X41 Tablet I was intrigued. It appeared to have the core features I needed: very light weight, good battery life, decent CPU and RAM and a reputable manufacturer. Gee whiz features like finger print recognition were cool but not on my must have list. I decided that I had found a perfect companion for my motorcycle trips and campus roaming here at Microsoft. I plunged in and placed an order.

So, I have been using my X41 for a few months now. Here are my impressions. The weight and battery life are great. The tablet features are pretty cool. The combination of a tablet with the fantastic OneNote (yep that is a shameless plug) is amazing. The next version of OneNote is even better. The real challenge for this machine is the hard drive. The internal hard drive is a 1.8” form factor. IBM sold their hard drive business to Hitachi a few years ago and since I haven’t opened the case to check I am assuming the drive in the X41 is from the TravelStar CK460 Slim line. If you look at the spec you will see the RPM rating is 4200. Being used to the TravelStar E7K60 and its 7600 RPM rating in my Dell this slower drive has been a disappointment. So far all the 1.8” form factor drives from any manufacturer have similar performance specs. The slow drive access is a real performance killer. The machine performs well with all the usual applications, but anytime you go to the disk the delay is quite noticeable. Until the right form factor drives are available I will have to live with it.

Next time: My experiences with fingerprint authentication.