Product Reviews

Although there have been rumours that IBM was considering a comprehensive redesign of the trademark ThinkPad look, thankfully sanity has prevailed. You could call the austere black lines boring, but a ThinkPad remains the only notebook that most people can identify from across a room.

The similar-looking but smaller ThinkPad T41 is our current A-Listed business notebook (see issue 113, p53), but the R50p is an altogether heftier proposition. It's a very serious piece of kit, with a full gigabyte of RAM allied to a 1.7GHz Pentium-M processor and a 60GB hard disk. But what really marks it out as a high-end machine is ATi's newest mobile workstation graphics chipset, the Mobility FireGL T2. As is usually the case with workstation-class graphics nowadays, the GPU, the FGL9600, is essentially the same as consumer-level Radeon 9600 parts, but with drivers geared towards industrial-strength robustness and featuring optimisations that aren't considered important for the consumer. The primary difference is a bias towards OpenGL support, along with increased focus in areas that are important for design work such as windowed 3D. The FireGL T2 has 128MB of dedicated memory and, as with ATi's desktop workstation graphics cards, has certified support for all major CAD and 3D design and animation applications; for example, AutoCAD, 3DStudio, LightWave, and SolidWorks.

The machine lacks very little compared to a desktop machine: on the left there are two PC Card slots, a V.92 modem, Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet, S-Video, audio and two USB 2 ports. The back is dominated by the nine-cell battery, which protrudes by about 20mm for three-quarters of the length of the rear, but there's still room for a parallel port. Finally, the right-hand side sports a VGA output and an optical drive in the form of a Matshita multiformat DVD writer, supporting both DVD-R and DVD-RAM. On top of the wired connections are 802.11a, b and g WLAN and Bluetooth adaptors, although as with other ThinkPad models neither interface has a hardware switch to activate them; you need to dive into the Access IBM utility. It's missing a FireWire port too, which could be useful for attaching external backup storage, and if we were being critical we'd say the machine needs a third USB port on the right-hand

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side to make it more convenient to attach a USB mouse, given that it lacks PS/2 ports.

All of IBM's ThinkVantage details are present, including the usual ThinkLight to illuminate the keyboard, although this is the first model we've seen in which the LED is yellow rather than white, which seems a bit of a retrograde step. Active Hard Drive Protection is there too, although despite checking the option to temporarily ignore repetitive movement (indicative of standard train and car bumps), in practice the system constantly kicks in and stops the drive on the train. In fact, the merest nudge as you reposition the unit on the desk is enough to make the drive protection warning pop up on-screen; it would be nice to have a configurable threshold rather than the simple on/off option for the protection system.

The 15in FlexView screen offers a very spacious 1,600 x 1,200 resolution, which for this size of screen isn't so high as to render Desktop furniture completely illegible. Contrast and brightness are good, but viewing angles are definitely less than we'd expect: at standard viewing distance the screen shows a dark vignetting effect, with apparent brightness rapidly dropping off at the edges in comparison to the centre. It isn't unbearable, but it's noticeable. More impressive in the usability stakes is the keyboard, which at around 285mm wide is the same size as a desktop unit, and with an absolutely solid feel that will let you type away for hours with no fatigue at all.

Despite its sleek looks, the R50p isn't hugely portable, weighing in at a heavy 3.2kg. Granted, this isn't incredibly weighty, but a bit too much for taking everywhere as a matter of course. But if you do want to use it on the move, you'll find the battery life, as usual for a ThinkPad, is very good; the R50p managed almost two hours when hammered by our intensive-use test, and four-and-a-half hours under light use, which reflects the sort of life you'll achieve with standard word processing and email tasks.

In our application benchmarks, the R50p came in with an overall score of 1.45, making it one of the fastest 32-bit notebooks we've seen. More subjectively, the FireGL T2 adaptor gives excellent results under OpenGL. Its polygon throughput is amazing and its ability to render fully textured previews in LightWave was incredibly fast and smooth.

The thing about ThinkPads is it's hard to find anything serious to criticise about them. Certainly, the R50p has its flaws, notably the relatively disappointing screen, but overall it's up to IBM's usual standards of superb design and engineering. At £2,699, it's a machine that's only worth the money if you really need its power, particularly the workstation-class graphics. But high-end notebooks are what IBM does best and the R50p is proof positive that the company is a long way from losing its touch.