Adeo Ressi

You know that it is bad when your bug-laden iPhone 3G provides a far superior computing experience than your $3,000 top-of-the-line Lenovo X61 Tablet with touch screen functionality. Initially, the X61 struck me as a giant iPhone. Now, it appears to be a gilded paperweight. It’s sad to see the once venerable brand of ThinkPad laptops sink to the level of plastic blinky rings bearing the same “Made in China” markings.

Outside of the fact that the machine itself with top installed RAM, CPU, and hard drive specifications simply can not run Vista, it suffers from a cheapness, poor quality, and unthoughtfulness. I am writing this on a MacBook AIR that cost literally half as much money and is vastly superior in every way. Leaving the OS aside, the AIR is actually small, versus the clunky “brick factory” design of the X61. The keyboard on the AIR is backlit, versus no lighting of any kind on the X61 keyboard. The touchscreen and tablet functions are “cool,” but they rarely can keep pace with the painfully slow Vista OS that performs as if it calculating the future polar ice climate models even when idle. To change the orientation of the X61 screen when you move the device around takes 30-90 seconds with each adjustment, backlogging switches as you move the device.

The very fact that a top of the line device left a factory floor with such poor standards is a testament that nobody is leading the company anymore. It is only worsened by the fact that my X61 broke shorlty after arrival, and it took a whopping SIX MONTHS to be repaired, versus walking into an Apple store and getting a new machine with all of my data backed up in 6 hours. I sent it to a central repair depot twice, and then they actually sent two seperate people onsite without necessary parts. Need I say more.

Avoid Lenovo. Avoid ThinkPad. It was a difficult $3,000 lesson for me to learn. Buy a cheap computer for a cheap amount of money instead…