David Berland writes for ZDNet, “This week represents an interesting confluence of events. For at least a couple of years, I’ve considered replacing my old clunker of a notebook, a 366 MHz IBM ThinkPad 570. Even our IT department has told me that it’s time to retire the system before the hard drive or the display suffers a catastrophic failure.” Berland goes on to describe how he’s narrowed down his choices to three options: a new IBM ThinkPad T40, a Hewlett-Packard TabletPC, or, surprise, surprise, a 12-inch PowerBook G4.
Berland says, “[Apple] first offered to send me the 17-inch version but I wasn’t about to lug that behemoth around.”
“The 802.11g-equipped PowerBook ($1,799 base price, $2,347 for the configuration shipped to me) arrived last week and, needless to say, it was the center of attention over the weekend. The PowerBook is packed with features and its industrial design is far superior to other notebooks. The keyboard is the best I’ve felt on a notebook. That’s right. Move over ThinkPad, which has been the keyboard ruler supreme.”
“This system oozes multimedia as though it were in its DNA. It only took a few hours for this PowerBook to seduce me into my first DVD-burning project ever. (Although it’s only 1.18 inches tall, it has a DVD-burning CD-RW drive.) . No Windows system I’ve ever owned brought out the fun in computing the way this one has.”
“While you can burn a few DVDs and rip some CDs, the true measure of the PowerBook will be if it satisfies my business needs and does it better and/or cheaper than Windows-based alternatives.”
Berland promises to keep us posted about his decision in coming articles. Full article here.