When my old 386 notebook bit the dust, I checked out the new breed of portables to find the best combination of power and feel. I loved IBM's ThinkPad and Apple's PowerBook. The ThinkPad's red nub pointing device kicks mouse butt, but the IBMs are ridiculously expensive for the power under the hood. And while I love the feel of the PowerBook, I gotta have my Windows apps.
I wound up getting both in one machine, the WinBook XP. In addition to the 520-Mbyte hard drive, 8 megs of RAM, and an internal 14.4-Kbps fax/modem, it has the same kind of kick-ass keyboard and red mouse pointer as the ThinkPad, with a PowerBook-like, comfortably sloped wrist-rest area in front of the keypad. My hands love this marriage. And the bright, dual-scan color screen is one of the best I've seen.
Downsides? The NiMH battery lasts a measly three hours. The optional 16-bit sound card is a bit noisy and bass-shy. And there's no SCSI port for plugging in a CD-ROM drive.
However, there isn't anything out there that packs so much muscle into such a good-feeling notebook for such a low price. I'm sold.
WinBook XP DX4-100: US$2,599. WinBook Computer Corporation: (800) 468 2162, +1 (614) 481 7460.
STREET CRED
Killer ComputersPedro Meyer's True Visions
What Kind of Nation Will We Be?
Best of Both Notebooks
They Do Make 'Em Like They Used To
