ThinkPad X41 Notebook 

The X 41 is the latest offering from Lenovo and the first thing you will notice about it is not its size or that it lacks any optical drive, but that it's extremely light, weighing just over a kilo. The tablet is powered by a 1.5 GHz P M and comes with a 512 MB of DDR2 RAM and has a 37 GB HDD. It comes with the usual stuff like Wi-Fi, infrared, a stylus, Windows XP Tablet PC edition and even some Biometrics in the form of a finger print reader!

The notebook has a fairly sturdy rotating hinge, and is quite comfortable to hold and use. The most amazing part about the notebook,

however, is the battery life, which returned 5 hrs and 13 mins on our Battery Mark 2002 test. This time is a whopping 70% more than the Sahara KN1 that had a little over 3 hrs of battery time (July shootout).

With an 18.6 in the Business Winstone Test, the notebook proved to be a very decent performer for business users. While the tablet is quite usable, you might feel a bit uncomfortable not having a touchpad, but only a trackpoint for the mouse. For non-IBM notebook users, this could be a minor annoyance, and they might end up spending a little extra on a wireless mouse. We also missed having a Win key on the keyboard. Features wise, we didn't find anything out of the

ordinary in this machine. 

In fact, we found a better bundle for just a little extra from other vendors. The HP Compaq TC4200 for instance, which retails for 1.49lakhs, has a faster processor at 1.86 GHz, wiht 2 MB L2 cache, an all formats DVD writer, and a whopping 80 GB 5400RPM drive! That's a lot more for just a little extra cost. 

Bottom Line: Buy it for its portability and battery life, but you will also need to buy an external optical drive as it doesn't ship with one.

Varun Dubey