IbmTthirtyReview

I emailed a review of the IBM T30 I was using to a few of my friends back in 2003. Here it is in it's entirety:

Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 17:10:44 -0800
From: "Philip J. Hollenback"
Subject: A few thoughts on my laptop

I've been using my new IBM T30 laptop for the last week, and its got some cool features I haven't seen before. Let's see what you think of them.

This is a 1.8ghz machine, nice and responsive. I do notice that the fan blows a very warm blast of air out of the left side. Still, battery life seems to be around 2.5 hrs, so I guess thats ok. Plus, air to the left is better than blisters on your penis (true story I read a couple months back). Plus its a nice hand dryer if you have sweaty palms.

I've always loved the little features IBM puts on their systems. Remember the butterfly keyboard? That was cool. This machine has a little reading light above the screen which turns on and off with a keypress. I like that, because I like to work in the dark and the screen alone doesn't illuminate the keyboard enough.. Another seemingly lame but actually cool feature are dedicated browser back and forward buttons above the arrow keys, like this:

b^f
<v>

They work seamlessly in any browser in windows. These are nice because I navigate w/ arrow keys a lot, so I can flip pages really quickly. Thumbs up from me.

Why do laptop manufacturers insist on providing both a touch pad and a thumbstick (which has another nickname based on female anatomy)? I hate both, but I hate touchpads less. This laptop has two touchpad buttons below, and three touchstick buttons between the touchpad and space bar. Lame. One cool touchpad driver feature is an easy way to scroll windows. If you touch and hold on the bottom or right edges of the pad, you can slide the window around. Visualize grabbing the scroller and moving it. Works really well.

I notice the IR port is active by default, so whenever I place my palm pilot on the right side of my computer, it wakes up and starts looking for the connection.

Anyway, a few ramblings about my laptop on a Friday evening. Now I just have to nuke this thing and install Debian linux before people start making fun of me...

P.