Farewell to ThinkPad, hello to style?

It finally happened. All I did was politely ignore a few dozen e-mails, several phone calls, a couple of faxes, and have one replacement notebook stolen, and IBM suddenly had enough. Two burly gentlemen came to visit me at my office, and after suspending me by my nether regions for a few minutes, they got the point across that IBM would very much like its ThinkPad T40p review notebook returned. Now. So, after physical therapy, I started counting my shekels and looking around for the best new notebook.

Turns out, however, that CPU horsepower isn’t the only thing power users are looking for in a business notebook these days. There’s a new factor: style. And it’s vexingly complex when you’re thinking of buying 30 of these for the new sales reps, for example. Until recently, style meant sleek, silver or black, and above all, small — as small as possible while still being able to run Office, surf the Web, and run the local VPN client.

But a surprising thing happened on the way to smallest and prettiest: The users changed. Go figure. Now many of them want to do more than just office work. They like MP3s, DVDs, peeking in on the babysitter using a home Webcam, and of course, playing games. Lots of games. Normally, you can thumb your nose at that: They’re at work; they should be doing work, not playing games. Can’t really justify that, though, when you’re talking to a salesperson who works during the day and hops from city to city at night. They want more than style; they want some real power. So when I ask about cool notebooks, I’m suddenly hearing names like Alienware Area-51m, Acer Ferrari 3200, and something called an ABS Mayhem G3. They’re colorful, they’re more heavily muscled than an Austrian Conan, and they ain’t cheap. But can they play in the business world?

And once asked, the question had to be answered. Alienware, unfortunately, is too cool for school and didn’t play. I didn’t even see Falcon Northwest’s new FragBook TL until early this morning, but ABS and Acer came across no trouble. Drop Windows XP Pro on them and there’s nothing these boxes can’t do when it comes to running business applications. So the question is, Do they fit in physically? Here, we’ve got some major issues.

Weight: The ABS Mayhem G3 arrived first, which was surprising because my UPS guy isn’t as healthy as he used to be, and something this heavy really should have killed him. There’s a slew of Mayhem-like notebooks coming our right now from folks like ABS, Hyperion, and Voodoo. They’re around 10 pounds with battery, and they sport power bricks the size and weight of a regular construction brick. I checked. Regardless of stylish color, these machines simply weren’t meant to move.

Acer’s Ferrari and, apparently, Falcon’s FragBook, have an edge. Neither could be considered light, but 6 pounds or so is still on the feasible side of mobility, provided you work out. Screen size isn’t the same as on the ABS crowd, but it’s still bigger than most. Amenities on the Acer were excellent, with a case designed with ergonomics in mind, including USB ports located together on the left side, a slot-loading DVD/CDR drive and a power brick that can’t be used to shore up my garage. And style is a given, combining a brilliant paint job with the Ferrari logo — a weird combination, but definitely cool.

Heat: This is a problem because power means CPU cycles, and for many, that means a real Pentium 4, not a Pentium M or, God forbid, a celery-like Celeron. Real Pentium 4s combined with 128MB, and even 256MB, video subsystems mean you can play even the most graphics-demanding first-person shooter on your “PowerStyle” notebook.

But CPU cycles mean heat, enough to brand the ABS logo onto your thighs if you leave the Mayhem on your lap running too long. I thought the Acer felt better, but I was wrong. After leaving it on a surface that allowed little airflow beneath the case, the AMD CPU got so hot the machine, ironically, froze.

Battery life: Forget the five hours I was getting with the ThinkPad. ABS topped out at 1 hour and 45 minutes. But Acer’s Ferrari and, supposedly, the FragBook do better. Acer’s AMD squeezed out almost 3.5 hours running Knoppix and Falcon dropped in a 2GHz Pentium M, which rumor has it keeps its battery life at almost 4 hours.

All this means you’ll be doing more support work on these machines, style or no. Cutting edge hardware always means more support issues, and hot batteries combined with short battery lives mean more user complaints. Plus, your users will want more stuff, including airline power converters like the one from APC, and even an air mouse like Gyration’s In-Air Mouse, because you can’t hose down Nazis on a tray table that’s already covered by the Mayhem.

But if the Ferrari 3200 and the FragBook TL are anything to go by, the bridge between power and mobility is getting more realistic every day. Give it a while to get the heat and component issues worked out, and they’ll definitely become viable corporate netizens — especially if somebody works a way to paint your corporate logo on them.

Meanwhile, as a one-man geek machine, that Acer is damn attractive.