Building the perfect laptop

From Busi­ness Week comes a longish arti­cle about Lenovo’s ultra­light X300 ThinkPad lap­top. There’s a pic­ture on the top of the web ver­sion of the arti­cle that shows a dis­as­sem­bled ver­sion of the lap­top. It’s the first Lenovo model to carry the ThinkPad brand name.

Weigh­ing in at 3 pounds, the X300 fits inside an interof­fice mail enve­lope and uses flash mem­ory for file stor­age, just like the Mac­Book Air. Lenovo is a major spon­sor of the 2008 Olympic Games, and the com­pany will sup­ply hun­dreds of X300s to Olympic staff this summer.

Walt Moss­berg of the Wall astreet Jour­nal gave the X300 a glow­ing review. He’s been a big fan of Apple prod­ucts for the last cou­ple years. In fact, Mossberg’s biggest prob­lem with the X300 is the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem. He notes that unlike the Mac­Book Air, the X300 has 3 USB ports, an RJ-45 jack, a DVD drive, and users can change and add their own batteries.

Design­ing a lap­top com­puter is tricky work

Lap­top com­put­ers are highly inte­grated devices that com­bine a bat­tery, screen, input devices, and ports with the computer’s core hard­ware. The final prod­uct must with­stand every­day use, as well as the occa­sional drop.

Cor­po­rate clients have very spe­cific requests. For exam­ple, some com­pa­nies want secu­rity fea­tures like power-on pass­words, asset tags, and encrypted net­work cards. It’s much eas­ier to engi­neer secu­rity into a product’s hard­ware than adding soft­ware or don­gles after delivery.

Other com­pa­nies are will­ing to sac­ri­fice speed and fea­tures for rugged con­struc­tion and reli­a­bil­ity. Pana­sonic Tough­books have become very pop­u­lar with police depart­ments and con­struc­tion firms.

Give the peo­ple what they want

The aver­age con­sumer tends to judge lap­tops on price, looks and enter­tain­ment fea­tures. Pre­in­stalled soft­ware can dic­tate the pur­chase deci­sion, espe­cially the oper­at­ing sys­tem. The abil­ity to expand and main­tain the com­puter is not an impor­tant consideration.

Any­one who uses a lap­top as their home com­puter needs to use an exter­nal hard drive or a sec­ond com­puter to backup their data. At any moment, that lap­top com­puter could be stolen or dam­aged. Read my 30 Sep­tem­ber 2006 arti­cle for some tips.

One exam­ple that I pointed out on 5 Decem­ber 2006 is the slot­less opti­cal drive that Apple includes on its lap­tops. Acer and other com­pa­nies have also put these dri­ves in their lap­tops. They have no tray, so there’s noth­ing to use as a cupholder. But, if a user inserts a non-standard CD or DVD into a slot­less drive, there is no safe or reli­able way to remove the disc. The opti­cal drive must be replaced at a ser­vice center.

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