First hardware review for a while! I would have wanted to write this post months ago, but Lenovo botched the launch of the Helix like no other. It was initially supposed to come out in February at a rumored price of about $1300, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on one at that price until now, almost five months later.
So I call these posts “reviews”, but these aren’t meant to be nearly as comprehensive as formal hardware reviews by any stretch of the imagination. It’s really just my thoughts on stuff that’s important to me, and if that does or doesn’t help anyone, so be it.
My last phone was the venerable Droid X, about which I haven’t actually written since I got it. That’s really a good and bad thing: on one hand, the phone has really done everything I need it to do, but on the other hand, I’m not really much of a phone power user. A large part of the reason I’m actually switching is because my contract expired in August and my family is changing over to one of these bulk plans (I think we’ll have 8 of 10 lines when all is said and done) from AT&T, and my Verizon Droid X wouldn’t work on the AT&T network.
Once upon a time when software overhead grew faster than hardware development “upgrade” was synonymous with “performance”. The latter was the reason you did the former and that was that. When performance requirements for basic computing plateaued in the days of Windows XP, I thought that my already slow upgrade cycle would slow even more, as nobody cared about silly things like power consumption or screen quality or form factor. Well, obviously I was wrong. Now I just upgrade whenever the hell I feel like it.
The 2010 11-inch Air is a laptop I liked so much that I bought it twice, even though I couldn’t find a use for it either time.
I’ve liked the MBA 11 since launch because I don’t believe that there is, by a fairly long shot, a comparable “conventional” equivalent. It’s basically right between the top end of netbooks and the bottom end of traditional ultraportables. This is a fairly vague and messy kind of comparison to make, especially given that the MBA line has just been refreshed, but I’ll try to get across how I see it.
I originally intended to replace my t400 with a t420 or t420s, but given that I’m typically docked to my two monitors when I’m doing anything that needs more screen-estate, I decided that I just don’t need a big laptop anymore.
I didn’t need to search far for an alternative to the t420(s). The vanilla x220 boasts the same spec as the vanilla t420 in a smaller form factor. Furthermore, the base x220 is only $100 more than the base t420 on Lenovo’s website, and the difference in price on the second-hand-new and second-hand-used market is basically nothing.
Traditionally the price gap between a comparable mainstream and ultra-portable laptop has been closer to the range of two times.
