2. High Quality And Very Photogenic: The Thinkpad T40 From The Outside

The housing and keyboard meet a high quality standard. Our only gripe is the absence of a Windows key. The housing surface is pleasant to the touch. The track stick and four-button touchpad serve as mouse replacements.

With dimensions of 312 x 31 x 277 mm (width x height x depth), the T40 is a truly "thin" device; not only that, but the 71.7W high-performance battery included tips the scales at a relatively modest 2.48 kg. The 14.1" display on the test unit has a native resolution of 1400 x 1050 pixels. Since text editing at such a high resolution is not everyone's idea of fun, IBM also offers a display with a resolution of 1024 x 786 pixels.

The protruding battery may offend aesthetes, but it also extends battery life.

The VGA connection and the removable tray for drive modules are on the right-hand side of the casing. The CD-R/-RW/ DVD combination drive in the tray is only 9.5 mm high.

The high-performance battery ($200 net) on the reverse of the casing juts out about two centimeters. Using the standard battery reduces the device's footprint to 312 x 255 mm. Because IBM did not supply a standard battery for the test, we conducted battery-life measurements using the high-capacity battery only. (The manufacturer says the high-capacity battery is included in delivery in Europe.) The standard battery offers a third less capacity and costs $170 (net). The parallel port is placed on the left, beside the battery.

Two Type II PC card slots, the audio connections, a gigabit network connection (10/100/1000 Mbit/s), the modem port, an S-Video output and two USB 2.0 ports stud the right side of the casing. The infrared connector is located in the center of the front panel beneath the display. In addition to the dual-band WLAN connector, the test device also has a Bluetooth radio for wireless communication with similarly equipped PDAs or mobile phones.