X300 Owners: What other makes did you consider?

[Charles Krug]

My company isn't normally an "early adopter", but we'll soon be needing an ultra-portable with built-in optical drive and WWAN.
If you researched this combination, what other machines did you find on the market? The X300 looks great, but I'd also like to see a competitive machine (though MAC is out). This will be replacing a Vaio S580. Thanks!
Jim

[Thecla]

we'll soon be needing an ultra-portable with built-in optical drive and WWAN. If you researched this combination, what other machines did you find on the market?

One other possibility is the HP Compaq 2510p. I haven't tried one, but I use an HP Compaq mobile workstation and really like it (build quality is excellent). The 2510p can be configured with optical drive and WWAN (Verizon or Sprint) for much less than the X300 (maybe around $1,800?), but that comes with a lower resolution 12.1"screen (1280 x 800) and a slow (4200rpm) hard drive. Upgrading the 2510p to a SSD costs almost $1,000 when it costs just as much as the X300. Battery life for the 2510p is reported at over 6hrs on the 6 cell battery.

For me, lots of disk space, really long battery life, and cost aren't significant limiting factors, and I plan to buy an X300 once a model with WWAN is available.

[Charles Krug]

Thanks, I'll investigate the 2510p. In this case, cost is not a significant factor for us either. Battery life is important to our user, and he would like a higher capacity drive. However, I think the deal breaker for the X300 will be the lack of a dock. More drive options may be offered in the future, and a wireless port replicator would be awesome -- just don't think we can wait for those to be introduced . . .
Jim

[cj3209]

Don't forgot about Panasonic's Toughbook line of notebooks:

http://icube.us/product_detail.cfm/prod ... /CF-Y7.cfm

14.1" SXGA LCD w/DVD drive at around 3 lbs!

Nice.

CJ

[Nickolai]

X300 won't have dock? Not even an option?

[akao]

I own and use the 2510p's earlier model, the nc2400. This model is just like the nc2400 except it doesn't have LED backlight and only has the pointer stick.

I bought this laptop, instead of the x61 because of the higher resolution screen and ULV processor (better battery life). In comparison to the x300, two important advantages are the availability of a simple docking station and the larger batteries.

If you care about battery life than the 2510p/nc2400 is the way to go since you can huge batteries that give me close to 6 hours of life (vista, full brightness, wlan on, bluetooth off, no dvd use).

Two problems that I've had with the nc2400 that I think also apply to the 2510p are that the fingerprint reader cannot be used as the bios password, and the bottom of the laptop gets hot when the CPU is pegged.

There's also the Sony SZ line.