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IBM ThinkPad X40 Review

Forget the TV Show -- This Is the Apprentice

April 20, 2004
By Eric Grevstad

Forget the TV Show -- This Is the Apprentice

You can easily find a more powerful, bigger-screened notebook for $1,000 less than the IBM ThinkPad X40. But after seeing it, you may not want to.

Big Blue's laptops are basic black, and the X40 goes back to basics: Instead of following today's trend toward desktop-replacement portables with giant screens, 3GHz-plus processors, and 3D-game-worthy or Windows XP Media Center video setups, the even smaller successor to the compact ThinkPad X31 is a minimalist system for mobile office productivity.

It has a superb keyboard, Swiss-watch-quality construction, exceptional emergency-recovery tools, all the latest wireless links (802.11b/g plus Bluetooth), and a perfectly adequate 12.1-inch display and 1.2GHz Pentium M chip instead of higher-testosterone components that would add bulk and subtract battery life. The result is less than half the weight of the abovementioned average laptops, with twice the battery life -- five hours' unplugged time in our real-world work sessions.

The X40 is a premium-priced, almost-no-compromise slimline, unashamedly designed to be your traveling companion instead of your only PC. As such, it has perhaps only one rival (more on that in a minute) as the most desirable executive-status-symbol notebook we've seen.

Models and Docks

IBM advertises that the ThinkPad X40 starts at $1,499 and weighs 2.7 pounds. That's true, but the configuration in question is a stripped-down starter with a 1.0GHz Pentium M processor, just 256MB of memory and a 20GB hard disk, no CD or DVD drive or docking base, and a smaller 4-cell lithium-ion battery.

By contrast, our test system will set you back $2,299, but has not only a Pentium M/1.2 chip but more practical 512MB of DDR333 and a 40GB, 4,200-rpm Hitachi hard disk, as well as an 8-cell battery that protrudes an extra inch from the notebook's rear -- increasing its overall size to 9.3 by 10.5 by 1.0 inches and weight to 3.2 pounds, not counting the petite 0.7-pound AC adapter.

It also comes with what IBM calls the X4 UltraBase Dock ($199 separately), a slice that snaps onto the ThinkPad's bottom -- and locks there, if you're not scared of losing the tiny, supplied key -- to turn the system into a slightly chunky but still easy-to-carry 4.9-pound laptop. The dock provides more input/output ports and a modular bay that holds an optical drive such as our system's Matsushita 8X DVD-ROM and 24/16/24X CD-RW combo drive ($199 separately), though no swappable DVD burner is currently offered. With various adapters, the bay can also hold a second hard disk or lithium-polymer battery.

If you don't want the UltraBase Dock, you can plug a $279 combo drive or $499 DVD-RW drive into one of the ThinkPad's USB 2.0 ports -- the one on the left, which also has a power connector so no AC adapter is required for the plug-in drive. Another extended-life battery option takes the form of an alternative slice or base, complete with prop-up feet; it has the same $199 price as a spare 8-cell lithium-ion pack.

As mentioned, we averaged five hours, plus or minus 15 or 20 minutes, from one charge of the 8-cell battery, combining low-octane word processing with disk-intensive software installation or multimedia and sticking to the top couple of brightness settings for the LCD. (The X40 required a little adjustment of our habits; unlike most other laptops, Windows' "10 percent of battery left" warning leaves you time to do some more work as well as save your work.)

Both the screen's 12.1-inch size and its 1,024 by 768-pixel resolution are minimal by today's standards, but we enjoyed a crisp, clear view with no bad pixels -- although the display turns into a photographic negative rather than offering a wide viewing angle for presentations. The Intel 855GME chipset provides strictly e-mail- rather than game-worthy integrated graphics; the ThinkPad managed a valiant 43 frames per second in the good old Quake III Arena benchmark, but slipped to 20 fps in an Unreal Tournament 2003 flyby and a molasses 3.6 fps with a Graphics score of 366 in AquaMark3 (its FutureMark 3DMark03 score was a record-low 115, with only one of four game simulations completed).

But though no ace at image or video editing, the X40 is perky enough when loading and running everyday office applications. The system racked up a PCMark04 score of 2,062 (CPU 2,286, memory 2,065, hard disk 1,852, graphics 506), with a BAPco SysMark 2002 rating of 126 (Internet Content Creation 140, Office Productivity 113).

Next: The Key Difference »

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