IBM ThinkPad A22p review

IBM hasn't lost the ability to surprise with its innovative portables. This is the company that gave us the wonderful unfolding keyboard a few years back, and most recently, the TransNote pen-pad and touchscreen hybrid (reviewed issue 79, p171).

Just as importantly, IBM knows when it's on to a winner, and when building on existing strengths this is a better policy than wholesale reinvention of the wheel. This is evident when you get hold of the ThinkPad A22p and compare it to its predecessors, which it closely resembles bar the incremental enhancements.

This isn't a criticism. In fact, it's quite the reverse. The ThinkPad range's design and build quality, especially on the top-end models like the A22p, are of the highest standard.

The angular styling is now classic, and IBM has wisely avoided the temptation to go all curvilinear and organic on us. Even if you don't give a hoot about looks, the essential solidness of the case and the exacting tolerances between it and the removable components, like the drives and the battery pack, will still cheer any hard-headed engineer's heart.

The large and expensive high-resolution TFT screen is shielded from harm by a proper alloy lid. Also, fans of obsessive detail will be reassured to learn that the little LED ThinkLight in the upper bezel remains to cast a faint illumination over the keyboard when you're working after lights-out on the redeye in from LA.

On the downside for some of us, the adherence to tradition also means that the ThinkPad is still equipped with a trackpoint instead of a glide pad. This remains fiddly and harder to control than a pad, and the high screen resolution exacerbates the lack of fine control, but more of that in a moment.

The keyboard gets it all right: a large, comfortable alphanumeric pad is surrounded by modifier keys that wouldn't look or feel out of place on a desktop keyboard, and the result is notebook typing without tears or expletives.

Progress has meant a new screen for the A22p, up from the previous maximum of 1,400 x 1,050 on the A22m to a new high of 1,600 x 1,200. This is expressed on a 15in panel, which means that while there's a fair amount of workspace, text and buttons are quite small.

Of course, you can up the default size of these things using Windows Display Properties, although I'm coming round to the view that 1,400 x 1,050 is as high as it should go on a 15in panel. Any more, and the balancing act between readability and the effort required to hit tiny buttons with the mouse pointer starts to break down.

This ThinkPad is genuinely a potential desktop replacement, and it's been built as such, with portability a little lower down the list of priorities than screen and keyboard ergonomics. This means a full-scale case and a 3.5kg carrying weight to match, so long distance travel is going to be hard work.

If you do have to rely on the ThinkPad on the move, you will be treated to a decently long interval before the battery expires. Our unremitting battery rundown test ran the lithium ion cell flat in 113 minutes, so you can expect at least three hours and perhaps more under normal usage.

A bay on the right of the case provides you with a fair degree of flexibility, with support for CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and CD-RW optical drives, or a second battery pack or hard disk. The bay supports warm swapping of modules, which still requires putting the machine into standby mode, but is preferable to a complete shutdown and cold boot.

When the time came for testing the ThinkPad's performance, we were most impressed by its high overall score of 2.67, which put it well ahead of Dell's 1GHz Pentium III Inspiron 8000 1000UT (reviewed issue 79, p172), as well as the 1GHz competition from HP this issue. With 32Gb of hard disk storage, 128Mb of RAM and speed like this, the ThinkPad has more than enough muscle to replace a business desktop.