Ordered my X201s!

[zverg]

So it was just this weekend that I was tipped off by a member here that the X201s was available for order in Australia. I was so excited, went and built on one the site to see what equipment would be available.

Well I checked this morning, and what do you know.. they're on the U.S. site now! Seems the options are more limited, as I was unable to order it without a touchpad

Here's the specs:
- X201s 5129CTO
- 2.13GHz Core i7-640LM
- 4GB RAM (2x2GB)
- 128GB SSD
- terrible quality (or so I'm told) WSXGA+ screen
- fingerprint reader and touchpad (only option in the U.S.?)
- Centrino Ultimate-N 6300
- Win7 64-bit (will be trashed immediately and overwritten with a prerelease version of Xubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit)
- UltraBase (with no optical drive because optical media is dead to me)
- ThinkPad USB keyboard (has a trackpoint but no touchpad yay)
- an extra 65W power adapter

As of 1 March, Estimated ship date is 2010.03.11!
Edit: as of 3 March, Estimated Ship Date is 2010.03.15 :/
Edit2: as of a couple days later, the Estimated Ship Date disappeared
as of 9 March, Estimated Ship Date is back to the 15th. That's way better than no estimated ship date
Shipped on 11 March (the laptop, not the additional power adapter or the usb keyboard)

My only complaint so far is that the UltraBase only has one digital video output. I almost went with a T410s just for that (one of the docks has two DVI and two displayport).

I ordered an NEC EA231WMi 23" IPS display from Amazon (has displayport) to go with it.

So excited!

So, who else has ordered?

Also, I just looked up the part number for the touchpad-less palm rest, it is "60Y5420". I just put in an inquiry a a ThinkPad parts site I've used in the past to see how much that'll cost.

[khtse]

Reviews show that the Core i5 and i7 CPUs are significantly faster than Core 2 Duo running at the same clock. In particular, the 2.13Ghz Core i7-640LM is faster than Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4Ghz), and perhaps even faster than (at least, comparable to) the P8700 and the P8800 (haven't seen a direct comparison of it with the latter two, I'm judging from the margin the 640LM won over P8600).

In the past, when I was making my purchase decisions regarding my X61 and X200, although I wanted the battery life of the "s" models and their lighter weight, I was hesitant because of the lower performance low voltage CPUs. But given how fast these newer low voltage CPUs are, I guess even for people who demand a lot of CPU power with their laptop can go safely with the X210s. Of course, if you want the ultimate CPU performance you can go for X200 with Core i5 540M 2.53Ghz, or even T or W series (Yes, Core i5 540M, being a normal voltage CPU, is faster than Core i7-640LM. Confusing numbering on Intel part.)

[zverg]

yeah I have a 2.53 Core2Duo in my MacBook Pro so I do hope it's at least very close to that performance. Of course the graphics card won't be nearly as good as the nvidia but oh well.

I actually don't care at all about battery life. As long as it can last an hour or two I'm fine. I have 4 power adapters for my macbook pro. One in the office, one in my home office, one in my living room, and one in my laptop bag. It gets 8 hours of battery life which I only use when I'm on flights so I can watch movies and stuff. The only reason I got the "s" was the high res screen. Most of the time it'll be used as a desktop in my office, but I manage the data center operations for the company so when I do need to go to the data center the extra screen real estate will be nice.

I'll have to hunt down one of these reviews of the processor, do you have a link?

[khtse]

Here is Anadtech's apple-to-apple test: 2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo versus 2.53Ghz Core i5, the rest of the system is basically the same
http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3705

Here is notebookreview.com X201/X201s/X201t review:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.a ... 01s+tablet
Their comparison with X200 is kind of an apple-to-orange test, since they didn't re-run the benchmarks, and they simply copied the numbers from their 1.5 years old X200 review. That particular X200 has a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB Ram, 7200rpm harddisk, and runs Vista. See here: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4497 But benchmark like Prime95 should be pretty much OS independent. Their battery life tests, however, are completely different between the two reviews and should not be trusted. Laptop Magazine, for example, find the X201t to have battery life significantly less than X200t (8-cell versus 8-cell). Anandtech's review also find that the Core i series give only marginal battery life improvement, if at all.

(Their review also mentioned that the 9-cell battery of the X201 series has a higher capacity than that of the X200 series, 94Wh versus 85 Wh, 10% increase. As long as the X201 does not draw more power than the X200, the new battery alone should give 10% battery life improvement.)

[zverg]

The Lenovo site still has no estimated ship date for me, but I called and the person I spoke with "talked with the warehouse" and they're saying "It is estimated to ship during the week of the 15th".

What kind of crap is that? A few people had theirs ship on Friday, and I ordered very early in the morning on the first day they were available for order. I guess there's something special about my config that is backordered.. not sure what though. I do know the USB keyboard ships in 9 days, but the person I spoke with wouldn't confirm is that was causing my delay.

[stylinexpat]

The Lenovo site still has no estimated ship date for me, but I called and the person I spoke with "talked with the warehouse" and they're saying "It is estimated to ship during the week of the 15th".

What kind of crap is that? A few people had theirs ship on Friday, and I ordered very early in the morning on the first day they were available for order. I guess there's something special about my config that is backordered.. not sure what though. I do know the USB keyboard ships in 9 days, but the person I spoke with wouldn't confirm is that was causing my delay.

Labor shortage in China after Chinese New Years. Many factories and companies can't find people to work for them as there are plenty of jobs out there.

http://www.thinkpads.com/2010/03/06/chi ... -shortage/

[Gary Miyakawa]

I ordered an X201s on March 1. Tracking looks like this so far:

ANCHORAGE, AK, US 03/07/2010 11:20 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
03/07/2010 9:22 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
SHANGHAI, CN 03/07/2010 9:55 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
03/07/2010 1:50 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
SHANGHAI, CN 03/06/2010 7:12 P.M. EXPORT SCAN
03/06/2010 10:12 A.M. ORIGIN SCAN
CN 03/06/2010 12:56 A.M. BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

According to UPS, It should be delivered in Atlanta on Thursday (11th). Hope so, I'll get home from Sao Paulo about 3 hours before delivery! (Timing is everything!)

Gary Miyakawa

[zverg]

I ordered mine at 8am on March 1st.. so this still tells me that I ordered some part in my configuration that no one else on here ordered since I think I'm the only one who is still waiting on shipment. oh well.

[elray]

So it was just this weekend that I was tipped off by a member here that the X201s was available for order in Australia. I was so excited, went and built on one the site to see what equipment would be available.

Well I checked this morning, and what do you know.. they're on the U.S. site now! Seems the options are more limited, as I was unable to order it without a touchpad

It comes as no surprise to me that the only stock "available" has a touchpad. How convenient, hmm? The fix is in...

Please let us know your experience with the USB Touchpadless keyboard.

[zverg]

Estimated ship date is back to the 15th, which hopefully means I'll have it in my hands a week from tomorrow. That's not too bad considering when I would order Dell laptops (when I worked internal IT up until this week) which were hardly customized and weren't a brand spanking new model at all, they'd take 2-3 weeks to come in.