Credit: Lenovo

Features: The tablet offers regular features that all other tablets offer, except that they make them look and work better.

There is a fingerprint scanner towards the right of the tablet screen; as you know, a fingerprint scanner is IBM’s way of securing notebook computers from intruders, and thus far, it appears to have worked rather well. This notebook incidentally has the best real estate utilization we’ve ever seen, which is appreciative. The X41 have buttons everywhere, in addition to numerous indicators that you may or may not use, but some of them (such as the HDD activity LED) are quite useful when you run heavy applications and the tablet appears to have hung up.

There is obviously the Access IBM utility, which takes about 4GB of HDD space; this makes sense most particularly on this machine, as there is no optical drive, so it would be unreasonable to provide any form of discs with it.

An interesting application is the bundled fingerprint software. Once you register your prints, you can use it to access your notebook without tapping in a secure (therefore lengthy) password. It would’ve been nicer if this somehow also linked to all our applications once we had logged in, but the lack of software support is hardly IBM’s (hereafter Lenovo) fault.

Performance: As it’s obvious from the specifications, the performance of the machine is nothing stellar. On the Business Winstone test, we managed a total score of 18.9, and this with everything (including default XP theme) switched off.

The battery mark scores, however, were mind numbing, as this is the longest lasting tablet PC we’ve ever tested. The Batterymark scores were at a stunning 5 hours and 13 minutes.

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