LevelsOfDetail

I've had my X60 for a few months now, so I've developed quite a few opinions about it. But first things first, the specs:

• 12 inch 1024x768 screen
• Intel Core Duo T2400 1.83ghz dual core processor
• 2GB of system memory
• 100GB hard drive
• Built in intel wifi, 3 USB ports, one firewire, SD slot, PCMCIA slot, GigE port

Looks: The X60 looks pretty much like any other Thinkpad. Classic and black. If you like Thinkpads, you like the X60. If you don't, then well, there aren't any pleasant surprises in store.

Likes:

• Keyboard illuminator light. Not sure I like it better than the Apple backlit keyboard, but it works pretty much just as well. Plus you can use it to illuminate other things than the keyboard.
• Battery life. I get an average of 5 hours+ with the large battery with my average use pattern. 6 to 7 hours is not unheard of either. On my Powerbook G4, I used to get 2.5 to 3 hours tops.
• Wireless disable switch
• Keyboard feel. Thinkpads are known for their nice keyboard, and the X60 lives up to the reputation. But there are a few gotchas (see below). Also, overall, I'd say I prefer the Powerbook keyboard. It had switches that required less effort to press down.
• Keyboard Drain Hole. Nice to know its there, even though I haven't needed it yet.
• Sudden movement detection and hard disk parking. Every laptop should come with this.
• Build. It feels as sturdy as the T series.
• It's light. Even with the bigger battery.
• Heat. It doesn't get very hot, even under heavy usage
• Quiet. It has a fan that runs sometimes, but it isn't very loud.

Dislikes:

• Thinkvantage software. Some of it is marginally useful, most of it is useless. The only thing I use are the volume control OSD, the external monitor profile switcher, and the undock menu. I tried the network location manager thing, but found that it sucks compared to Apples version, so I just uninstalled to use to the basic XP stuff
• No touchpad. I know they don't have space, but the nub hurts my finger after a while.
• Scrolling sucks. Two fingered scrolling is definitely the right way to do this. Aside from not working very well, the middle button + nub scroll doesn't even work in a large number of applications.
• No ports on the back. Ethernet is on the left, and power is on the right. This means that whenever I'm hooked in, I usually have cables coming out both sides, which is kinda ugly
• Keyboard Gotchas. They added the windows key, which makes the control and alt keys very small. I don't mind the control key so much, since i remap caps lock, but having a small alt is really annoying. Also ESC is a small key right above F1, and I always hit F1 when I mean ESC, which gives me the help menu in Vim. The backspace is only a normal sized key, and backslash is a half-sized key.
• Screen. XGA is too small to get any real work done, though its fine for doing non work stuff. At this form factor, its hard to complain. My bigger complaint is the poor viewing angle of the screen. It seems particularly bad on the vertical axis.
• No DVI. I can tolerate XGA on the builtin screen, but not being able to hookup to a Flat panel in digital mode totally sucks. And worse yet, even the docking station doesn't have DVI. I seriously hope this is the last X-series with this misfeature.
• Sound quality: isn't the best. Sometimes it picks up noise from the network. Standard set of problems that come with cheaper sound parts. Oh well, hardly any laptop gets this right

I guess it seems like I have more complaints than things I like. But all in all, this is the best laptop I've ever used. The positives generally outweigh the negatives, which are more like minor annoyances anyways.

There are definitely a few usability things that I miss from the Powerbook, but they're not fatal. Some of it is just what you get for using Windows I suppose.

The X60 has definitely redefined my expectations for battery life in a laptop. If only for that reason, I'll probably be stuck on this sub-notebook form factor for a long time to come. Though if Apple did manage to ship a similar form factor machine with comparable battery life, I would seriously consider switching back.

I decided to give the new Ubuntu beta a whirl on my X60. Recently I've heard a few anecdotal success stories of running Ubuntu on laptops, so it seemed worth a try.

I was concerned about running a beta installer on my work machine, so I decided to run the Edgy installer instead. I backed up my important files and used the built in NTFS resize functionality to make space (which, worked surprisingly well, considering my past experience with it). Once Edgy was installed, I used the update manager to pull in the new beta version (you can do so by running update-manager -d). The update took a while, as it had to download all the new packages, but the install completed without a hitch, and one reboot later, I was running Feisty.

First impression: looks mostly the same. Same brownish theme, and same ugly fonts in Firefox. I did get a bubble notification at start up that told me that I was using "restricted" drivers. A few clicks later, I was told that they were for my wireless chipset. Fine, whatever. I appreciate what they're trying to do here, but I don't think most end users really care. Feisty seems to make it very clear that "restricted" drivers are unsupported and may have problems that can't be fixed. Yet it seems ironic and somewhat pointless, since for most users, Ubuntu is going to have problems that aren't going to be fixed regardless of whether the at-fault component is open source or not.

Anyhow, I do applaud them for at least distributing the driver, and to make it work without any user intervention. It's a good start.

The one feature that was going to decide whether I was going to be able to use Linux regularly on this machine was suspend-to-RAM. The first time, I just I tried it as a normal user would (by hitting the sleep hotkey), and it worked! I was rather surprised, since I had heard all kinds of fun stuff about having to write custom scripts that unload and reload things as your machine goes into and out of sleep.

The feeling of "finally!" quickly faded, though, as the second and third attempts all failed in different ways. The first time, the wireless card disappeared. The second time, the screen wouldn't come back. The third time, I lost sound.

Well, so much for that. I tried a suspend-to-disk a few times, and that seemed to work. But I don't feel motivated enough to debug the hardware issues to make the sleep work. It's probably going to make me compile new kernel modules or god knows what.

That being said, it seemed that the whole sleep thing was very close to working. Much closer than any previous incarnation of Linux I had seen. Most of the special Thinkpad hotkeys worked, and it didn't seem like any of the apps freaked out about the machine going to sleep underneath them. The battery, as well as the CPU frequency scaling seemed to work fine.

Not everything was negative, there were a few "I wish Windows did this" moments. One was the support for the conventional "middle button scroll" feature of Thinkpads. Since many Thinkpads don't have touchpads, IBM had a feature where you press and hold the middle mouse button to turn the track point into a scroller. On Windows, it works fairly well, but you always run into apps that don't support it. It's as if the functionality is implemented a little too high up the stack. The most annoying effect is that the scroll functionality get's lost when using remote desktop client software. Both VNC and RDP clients will not properly send the scroll events to the remote end, which sucks.

On Linux, you can just use the "EmulateWheel" option in your xorg.conf file to turn on this exact feature. And it works at the X-server level, so it works with all apps that understand scroll events. This is certainly an improvement over Windows.

At the end of the afternoon, however, it doesn't make sense to run an OS that can't properly drive all of your hardware. I suspect that this might actually be the case for my desktop, so I will investigate that when the final release is available.

For now, on the Thinkpad, I'm much better off running Feisty in a VMware Workstation environment (especially with the new version which will have VMI support so things will be pretty fast).

As someone who's been using Linux in various forms for a while, I fully understand that it's not really Ubuntu or Canonical's fault that these things don't work. ACPI is really hard, and closed drivers make everything hard. But until the community figures out how to overcome these problems, Linux doesn't have a chance in the laptop space.

Maybe it'll happen like this: People will realize Vista blows. Linux will continue to catch up and eventually get good enough to be equivalent of the XP experience (on a few hardware configurations). Maybe a migration to it will become possible with some extra pieces like Parallels-like "coherence" except with a Linux host and an XP guest. People will start to see Linux as a potential alternative, and all of a sudden, companies that write Linux drivers that work will have an advantage.

Or maybe some big hardware PC manufacturer will finally try to get off the sinking Vista ship, and release a limited line that is tested to run with Linux, and has a hardware configuration that is as Linux-friendly as it can be. Who knows. Maybe it'll be Dell. Someone the size of Dell might be able to use it's influence to convince suppliers of hardware components to even write drivers, or at least release specs.

Before I go, a few miscellaneous observations about Feisty:

• Still uses freetype 2.2.1. Not sure if there's a reason. 2.3.1 seems to work fine for me at work, and works better with some fonts.
• The default font settings are "grayscale" smoothing and "medium" hinting. It looks pretty good for GTK apps, but for some reason Firefox looks pretty ugly.
• ThinkWiki is a pretty useful site that has a lot of random details about running Linux on Thinkpads. You can solve some of the smaller problems by reading those pages, but it doesn't seem like it will help you solve big problems like getting suspend-to-RAM working.
• Battery life under Linux seemed pretty good. At full charge, the readout was at about 5.5 hours, and it didn't seem to drain particularly quickly or anything.
• Firefox still doesn't support GTK input methods out of the box. You still have to set up your GTK_IM_MODULE env variable to point to something

Not really a full review, but an initial impression of Safari 3 for Windows.

• It's FAST. I know Jobs harped on this during the keynote, but it is definitely the snappiest browser that I've used on windows. It has none of the UI sluggishness that Firefox has.
• Japanese input doesn't work. Not in the UI, and not in any of the web pages. I guess it's still in the works.
• Seems to be somewhat memory intensive. Four tabs brings it to ~190M in my task manager.
• It's got a super simple bug reporting interface. Open source programs should do this.
• It's got OS X's font smoothing on Windows. I detect a little bit of color fringing, but it still looks pretty good.

Overall, I think it's a strong candidate to replace Firefox for my home usage.

One more annoyance: It appears not to support my thinkpad's middle button scrolling functionality. I'm not sure if the fault is with Safari or Lenovo. The middle button scroll doesn't work in a lot of apps..

A super short review.

I finally went to the SF Apple store to play with one.

It's pretty good. Things seem to work as advertised. Typing didn't seem too bad, though I can understand how people would miss their physical keys.

I tried to post on this blog with one, but Safari crashed three times in a matter of ten minutes accessing different parts of this site.

Looks like they've got a bit more polishing to do. Seemed like something I could buy. But the Blackberry Curve looks a little more attractive for now.

Ok, my last post about this thing, I promise.

Since there are tons of other reviews on the web about this thing (where you can see pictures and specs and measurements and the like), I'll just link to those articles that I read if you want to read about that stuff.

• BeHardware's comparison with the Samsung 305t
• Paul Stamatiou's personal review
• Trusted Reviews

I'm just going to talk about what I noticed.

This monitor came with glowing reviews around the net. The other contenders are the HP LP3065, the Samsung 305t, and the 30 inch Apple Cinema Display. The reason I originally purchased this model was because a) it was the cheapast, b) it had good reviews, and c) it has a enhanced (wider) color gamut.

Setup

Setup is mostly painless. Just make sure you have a dual-link capable vgi card, and if your card has multiple outputs, make sure you plug it in to the correct one (some cards only have dual link on one port). As everyone also notes, the brightness settings come with no OSD. That's mostly ok, except it makes it impossible to "go back" to an old setting unless you count the number of ticks from one of the extreme endpoints. It seemed like there were about 9 or 10 ticks from darkest to brightest, but you never know of the incremental adjustment grows exponentially the longer you hold it down. In this regard, having capacitive switches is actually a negative. It made it impossible to count based on tactile feedback. Supposedly if you have an Dell XPS machine, you can load some software that has many more calibration options.

Size and Resolution

The screen is huge, and similarly to other LCD's, at full resolution, the image looks very sharp. Because the screen is so big, there is a tendency to sit farther back from it then say you would a 20 inch monitor. This causes the percieved size of each pixel to be smaller, so text can seem smaller as well. Of course you can always try to make the fonts bigger, but it's something to think about. Physically, this screen has 100 pixels per inch -- the same as a standard 1600x1200 20 inch LCD.

Another thing that some readers might care about: interaction with high-index-of-refraction glasses. I just got a new pair of glasses that have the highest index I could get. It turns out, the higher the index, the more likely you are to see color fringes along high contrast edges that are off to the side of your field of view. Well guess what, combine these properties with sitting in front of a huge display that displays many high contrast rectangular shapes, and voila, fringe city. The first time, I had to put my contacts in because it was so distracting. The second time, I noticed it less.

Wide Gamut

It may also not be able to display shades of colors that the designer did intend. How can this be the case? it has to do with the bit depth. Both standard 72% NTSC monitors and this 92% monitor are driven by data that comes in at 8 bits per color. This means that the wider gamut monitor maps the same 8 bit space to a larger range of colors. That means values in the space that are a value of one apart will be farther apart in terms of actual color. So if a designer intended a particular value X in the sRGB color range, your HC monitor has a less fine-grained capability to approximate X.

In practice, it's hard to say if you'll notice. It probably really depends on what you're looking for.

If you forgo calibration, then normal content on this monitor will look super saturated and weird. Some of the reviewers liked this effect in games. To me it looks like "neon", or "radioactive", and it's distracting. Web designers will often pick subtle colors that don't create distractions in their designs. This monitor, uncalibrated, will destroy all those carefully picked hues. A lot of reviews or mini-reviews will say something like the "colors look vivid", but in actuality it's just like you turned up the saturation dial a bit too far in Photoshop.

Another problem for me personally is that Linux has no way of setting a global desktop-wide color profile (at least not that I'm aware of). There are a few color managed apps on Linux now, but they are still few and far between. So if you want to play around with Linux as a desktop, be prepared to look at super saturated colors. I tried full-screening Ubuntu running inside a VM, and the default orange titlebars were way too strong, again, not displaying what the designers intended.

If you really need the 92% gamut and you know what you're getting into, then by all means go for it. But for the average consumer who doesn't have a calibrator, I can't say that it's a clear win. It's definitely not as much of an advantage as I had thought it would be. It's mostly a software problem, but nonetheless, it is a problem. Mac OSX apparently fares better, but you'll still need a calibrator.

In the medium term, you're probably better off waiting for the new DisplayPort standard to become widespread, and look for monitors that support 10-bits per color (which DisplayPort allows for).

Anti-Glare Coating

Who cares about the coating? I mean besides the choice between glossy and matte, there's not much to say about it right? Well, that's what I thought too until I saw this monitor. The 3007WFP-HC has by far the most visually distracting sparkly effect produced by its anti-glare coating out of any LCD monitor I've ever seen. It reminded me of one of those really cheap CRT that have sparkly coatings, or one of the aftermarket glare coatings that people would place over their monitors.

I compared the effect to as many other monitors I could find. My Thinkpad X60 doesn't exhibit the effect at all. My Dell 2007fp and 2005fp at work shows it somewhat, but its much less prominent. My NEC 2070nx also is about the same level as the Dell 20 inchers: noticeable, but only if you really look for it. My older Planar PL201M doesn't show it at all, but this monitor is from 2003, so who knows what they used for coating back then.

To really make sure I wasn't crazy, I went to the Apple store to check out the 30 inch ACD. Sure enough, it had the effect too, but also less pronounced. It was more tolerable and less distracting.

The effect is somewhat difficult to describe. It's as if someone put a thin layer of vaseline on the top surface of your screen. This produces a sort of noise that is overlayed on top of the image that your monitor is actually producing. If you move windows around, the noise stays fixed, as it is a property of the coating, and not the LCD itself.

On the Dell 3007WFP-HC, the sparkle has a lot of color variation. For those of you into photography, it can be desribed as really fine chroma noise. On all the other monitors I looked at, the effect is more like just a variance in luminance (i.e. a "gray noise"). The lack of color in the other monitors makes it much easier to forget about. On the Dell, my eyes would keep trying to focus on this color noise rather than the actual content, and this made reading somewhat tiresome. It was most prominent on solid light colors, like a completely white screen.

On the spec sheet, Dell calls it the new "3H" coating. But I couldn't find any more information on the web.

Verdict

I got it from Costco exactly for the reason that I wasn't sure I was going to like it. In retrospect, I think I was a bit too much of a stat junkie on this purchase. The monitor looks great on paper, but for me the coating was a fatal flaw, and the wide gamut was of unclear value.

For a monitor that I paid > $1000 for (for hobbyist use, no less), I felt that I shouldn't keep it unless I could confidently say I had no major complaints. But using this monitor has been a struggle in trying to like it. After a few days, one just has to give up.

Side Notes

I've reported my experiences on running previous versions of Ubuntu on the Thinkpad X60. Here are the notable updates with Hardy Heron:

• Wireless: Ubuntu dropped the closed source ipw3945 driver from their restricted packages repository, instead, opting to use the iwl3945 driver that's included in upstream kernel sources. Unfortunately, the version that gets shipped with the kernel is way out-of-date and doesn't work well. Or in my case, not at all. The solution is to grab newer drivers from the compat-wireless project. They have a build system that can overlay newer drivers on top of an existing kernel module directory. I tried a snapshot from April, and it worked fine for me. After a reboot, the card came up and worked fine through the NetworkManager.

  One remaining gripe with the wireless is that the hardware kill switch only works half way. It will kill the wireless if you turn the switch off. However, turning it back on doesn't re-enable the wireless until you re-insert the iwl3945 driver. I can script it, but still a major pain in the ass.

• Graphics: Compiz seems to work fine (though I don't care to use it). Metacity's compositing mode seems to work too, though it's disappointingly slow.
• Battery: Battery life seems better than with Gutsy, provided that you're willing to do some work. First step is to install the powertop package, run the utility, and follow it's recommendations. Next, take a look at this guide on Thinkwiki, detailing a few more settings that can be tweaked. It still sucks that you have to do this all manually. Most of the settings are easily scriptable, and I'm sure there's a way to automatically trigger them when you go into battery-powered mode, but I haven't quite gotten there yet. Feels like I shouldn't have to do this much work.
• Suspend/Resume: Seems to work. Only tried it about 5 times.
• Temperature: This is still my biggest gripe. Even with all the tweaks described above, the laptop as a whole gets considerably hotter than when running windows. Particularly the bottom side and the right side of the palm rest. While it's better than before, it still annoys me enough that I'll run Windows most of the time. It's particularly bad when it's plugged in (and some of the power saving features get turned off)
• Software: Overall, Gnome hasn't changed much (which is a good thing IMHO). Firefox 3 seems like a huge improvement, except for the fact that FoxMarks doesn't work yet (but I expect that to work before the temperature control does).

Progress I suppose. But less than I had hoped for. I know Lenovo sells these things with SuSE, but I don't think the experience is much better on those models. I made a feeble attempt at running the Emperor Linux Kernel, but couldn't get it to boot. I'm getting a little pessimistic that Linux will ever run completely fine on this machine (read: all the hardware works) during it's useful lifetime. Oh well.

OK, I've had the monitor for about a week now, and I also got it calibrated with the Eye-one display 2 calibrator that I got from newegg. Here are the full notes:

• Wide Gamut: It's still there. It's still kind of annoying. Firefox 3 makes the experience quite a bit more bearable, but Flash doesn't support it yet so video's often look like candy colors still. I also get the feeling that cleartype might not be tuned for wide-gamut monitors.. but I don't understand the theory enough here to really say. Even with the calibration-corrected gamma, text looks every so slightly more fringy. It could also just be the bigger pixels when compared to my NEC 2070NX.
• Color uniformity: A few readers on the HardForum thread for this monitor have reported a green-to-pink color uniformity problem. I think I see it too, though it is very faint. Here's a picture that I took that exaggerates it:
  
• Ghosting: I don't see too much motion blur, but there is some inverse ghosting. Doesn't really bother me that much though.

I'm new to calibration, but my with my first profile, the monitor validator that comes with Eye-one Match tells me I have an average deltaE of 0.69, which I understand is pretty good. There definitely seems to a bit of technique to this, so I'll have to update this post if I manage to coax better numbers out of the screen.

At this point, I'm seriously debating returning this monitor and just getting an NEC 2490 instead. Everyone likes the 2490, and after I've spent 600+ on this one, spending 300 more the best thing out there doesn't really seem like a big deal. If I use the monitor for the next 4-5 years, it seems totally justifiable. I still don't really buy the whole wide-gamut thing, and it seems like it's going to take a while for people to sort out more-than-8-bit displays anyways.

• vmmouse works out of the box. About fricking time.
• LiveCD installer is pretty cool. It does an image based install, which seems pretty darn fast.
• Fonts still suck. Waiting for someone to post subpixel-enabled rpms.
• YUM seems usably fast now. But background update processes lock the database for a long time, which is annoying.
• Input method setup was easy. Japanese input method there by default. Also VLGothic was there by default.
• Nice artwork.
• Trying to turn on desktop effects in a VM crashes the X server. Boo.
• Thanks for shipping some nice included desktop backgrounds.
• Nautilus still uses object-oriented mode by default!?
• sbin is in the path. FINALLY. Also rm is no longer aliased to rm -i. Also about frickin' time.
• Weird text-mode boot splash. But I actually like text mode boot splash. Less to go wrong
• Why is the initial user not in the sudoers file? At least give me the option.

Random screenshot: