WHAT’S HOT: With the ibm ThinkPad T20 battery, the follow-up to the popular ThinkPad 600 battery series, IBM sets a new standard for travel notebooks. The T20 features a bigger screen for its weight than any other notebook here. Yet it manages to pack almost every built-in convenience that an all-in-one notebook fan could ask for–plus a number of IBM-only innovations–into a well-designed, titanium-reinforced case. With a travel bezel in its modular bay, the T20 weighs only 4.6 pounds, the lightest we’ve seen for a notebook with a 14.1-inch screen. Even carrying the internal 8X DVD-ROM drive you get at this price, it still weighs only 5.2 pounds. In addition to offering the expected ports and connections, including two PC Card slots and network and modem jacks, the T20 boasts the best audio and the most useful electronic documentation. It doesn’t make you fumble underneath the notebook for a lever to eject devices from the bay. (A $195 SuperDisk drive, a $389 4X/4X/20X CD-RW drive, a $189 second battery, and a $670 second 18GB hard drive are available.) Instead, IBM provides a simple switch on the outside of the case that pops out a pull-tab. Like the HP OmniBook 6000, the T20 comes ready to use the new Bluetooth wireless protocol for communicating with personal digital assistants, printers, and other devices at greater distances than infrared can handle. Both notebooks will need special PC Cards, available later this year, to use this feature. However, unlike the OmniBook, the T20 will beam Bluetooth radio waves from an unobtrusive connection built into the top of the screen, dubbed the UltraPort. IBM says the port, protected beneath a small rubber plug when not in use, will send signals more clearly than notebooks that rely solely on a Bluetooth PC Card. In the meantime, you can use the UltraPort as an alternate connection for a tiny $106 Universal Serial Bus digital camera that takes stills and videos. Finally, the T20 includes the ThinkLight, a feature introduced last year in IBM’s consumer I-Series line of ThinkPads. A tiny LED embedded in the top inner edge of the screen, the ThinkLight illuminates the keyboard just enough to make it possible to type in bed at night or in a darkened meeting room without squinting.
WHAT’S NOT: IBM recommends that the T20’s hard drive, which sits deep inside the notebook behind the battery, be removed for upgrades only. IBM ends free support after 3 years. Thereafter, it costs $35 per incident.
WHAT ELSE: ibm ThinkPad R60 battery turned in a solid performance in our speed and battery life tests. It outpaced the Toshiba Tecra 8100, the only other Pentium III-700/550 notebook in our roundup, by a small margin. The T20’s battery life, a little above average at 3.3 hours, falls in the middle of the pack. IBM didn’t change the famously comfortable ThinkPad keyboard much for the T20. We found the typing action as rock-steady as ever, with the same comfortable red eraserhead and leverlike mouse buttons. It did sound a little louder, however. The T20 boasts fairly powerful built-in audio for a small notebook, with volume that’s easily raised, lowered, or muted via a set of buttons at the top of the keyboard. An S-Video port lets you watch DVD movies on a television set. (Our test unit did not have DVD-ROM drivers, so we couldn’t test the T20’s DVD image quality.) Instead of being mixed in with myriad other status lights most users don’t care about, the battery charge light sits in the right screen hinge, where it’s easy to spot. The ibm ThinkPad T21 battery comes with both a full set of print manuals and the best electronic documentation we’ve ever seen. A quick-launch button (which wasn’t working on our unit) at the top of the keyboard is programmed to open Access ThinkPad, an introductory screen that links to a handful of IBM Web sites and works with the on-board Windows Help-style ThinkPad Assistant. The Assistant makes searching easy, and once you’ve found the information you need, it’s often accompanied by a slick, animated tutorial.
BEST USE: Although it wears the third-highest price tag in our two-spindle notebooks roundup, the $3699 ibm ThinkPad R60e battery is worth every penny. It packs a bigger screen, a more comfortable keyboard, and a larger set of useful features into a smaller package than any of its competitors. It should delight ThinkPad fans and newcomers looking for a lightweight notebook hampered by few compromises.