Lenovo’s latest ultraportable notebook, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, is only slightly wider and thicker than the Apple MacBook Air, but can still fit snugly into a manila envelope. The ThinkPad X300 tops the MacBook Air by packing in a built-in DVD burner, a removable battery, and multiple USB ports. The weight of the ThinkPad X300 varies from 2.9 pounds with a 3-cell battery and no optical drive to 3.3 pounds with a 6-cell battery and DVD Burner.

The X300 has a 13.3 inch screen with a 1440 by 900 native resolution. It has a full sized keyboard, the same keyboard found on Lenovo’s 14- and 15-inch models, as well as both the red eraser-head Track Point pointing stick and a touch pad. It has a fingerprint reader (after seeing the price you’ll be glad there is one!). There is also a 1.3-megapixel webcam and a noise-canceling digital microphone for Web conferencing.

There is no hard drive option on the X300, only a 64GB solid-state drive. (If you choose Windows XP Professional instead of Vista, you’ll still have some space left for your own applications and files) It has 2GB of RAM, upgradeable to 4GB.

As for connectivity, the ThinkPad X300 features 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi), Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, Intel UWB, GPS and Verizon WWAN (EV-DO).

So what is the best mobile device for browsing the web? By mobile device I’m excluding small notebooks and tablets which run Windows.

Firstly there are a number of factors which influence the quality of web browsing. The actually web browser engine, physical screen size, screen resolution, bandwidth and ease of navigation all play a part in the browsing experience. On the “Mobile browser rendering” webpage by Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones, a series of tests performed in 2005-2006 were used to compare mobile web browsing software.

Normal cellphones – in other words cellphones without extra large screens, non-converged mobile phones, non-smartphones – generally have the worst browsing experience. This is usually due to small screens coupled with rather average browsers and bandwidth. Usually with these cellphones you can only browse to the sites which the carrier allows you, via text menus. In contrast I’ve seen the Motorola A780, not much bigger than most cellphones, but which runs Linux with the Opera Browser. You can go to any webpage, and pages are rendered really fast. This is a good mobile browsing experience but the cellphone is a smartphone.

Of course I cannot mention browsing on a smartphone without mentioning the iPhone. With a screen measuring 3.5 inches diagonally and resolution of 480 by 320 pixels, running the Safari browser, it naturally has an advantage when it comes to mobile browsing.

They say that you can never have too much memory (in your PC), but with 32-bit Windows XP and Vista you can.

On machines with more than 3GB of RAM, Windows XP and Vista will report total System memory (RAM) of less than 4GB, often considerably less.

So why is this? Oversimplified, ranges of physical memory are shadowed to support devices in a PC, and above 3 GB larger chunks of memory are used. Daniel Rutter explains it quite well on his Blog “Dan’s Data” in the article “Ask Dan: What’s with the 3Gb memory barrier?“.

The Microsoft knowledge base article No 929605: “The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed” explains how memory above 3GB is used. Naturally Vista Service Pack 1 has a fix - knowledge base article no 946003: “Windows Vista SP1 will report 4 GB of system memory (RAM) on systems that have 4 GB of memory installed“. Of course this is “a reporting change only“, so the actual amount of RAM is reported corrected, but large chunks above 3GB are still used in the same way.

Basically what this all boils down to is that on a 32-bit Operating System, more than 3GB of RAM is a waste. So the HP (Hewlett-Packard) Pavilion dv9810us Notebook with 3GB of RAM has enough RAM, not too much.

While doing research for a blog about smartphones, I came across some figures which blew the whole idea for my blog out of the water. The Symbian Operating System is not very well known here in the US, with roughly a 5 percent market share of smartphone sales. However, Symbian smartphones make up well over 50 percent of the smartphone market worldwide. RIM (think Blackberry) is in second place worldwide, and the Apple iPhone in third place with 6.5 percent. (Figures from February 2008 report by Canalys and
“Canalys, Symbian: Apple iPhone Already Leads Windows Mobile in US Market Share, Q3 2007” from Roughly Drafted online magazine) .

The Symbian OS is a proprietary operating system, designed for mobile devices. Note that it is Symbian and not Simian. Symbian is jointly owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens, and Samsung. (see Symbian OS article in Wikipedia).

An example of a smartphone which runs Symbian is the Nokia N95 Smartphone. The N95 is loaded with features: 5 Megapixel Camera with flash, FM Radio, MP3 Player, Video Capture and playback, voice Recorder, productivity applications and web browsing. The N95 is expensive as no US carrier has picked up the phone. However, since it is unlocked and Quad-band, it can be used on any GSM network anywhere in the world.

My previous blog about Memory Cards got me thinking, so here is more about Memory Cards:

Physically the largest memory card available is the CompactFlash Card. This format has been around since 1994, and is still popular in high end digital cameras. The largest capacity currently available is 32GB, with Samsung having announced a prototype of a 64GB CompactFlash card in 2006.

On the other end of the scale, the tiny, fingernail-sized microSD Card is physically the smallest. I always get a bit nervous when handling a microSD card as I’m concerned I may drop it and never find it again. Fortunately microSD cards are almost always packaged with SD Card adapters, so they can be read in SD Card readers. MicroSD cards are mainly used in cellphones, portable media players and handheld GPS devices. The largest capacity microSD (actually microSDHC – High Capacity) card currently available is 8GB.

Somewhere in between the microSD and the SD card format is the miniSD card format. It was originally intended for use in cell phones, digital cameras and MP3 players. It seems to be slowly being supplanted by the microSD card.

Some card manufacturers have a neat product which can be used as a microSD, miniSD or SD Card – like the SanDisk 2GB microSD Card with miniSD and SD Adapters.