blog.olbrecht.net

Short answer: No. fucking. way.

I’m not talking about security issues, device management, apps or other stuff. I’m talking about the basics of enterprise computing: PIM (personal information management).

I’ve been testing a Google Nexus 7 running the currently latest available version of stock Android (4.1.2) and it is syncing to my Office 365 account. What makes me want to throw up is the following: They still can’t handle calendar events properly. Birthdays show up not as all-day events but rather as three events spread over roughly 26 hours. WTF?

It’s not like this is a pie-in-the-sky issue. This is *basic* stuff. It should just work. And it’s an old issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9731

Something else: Those who think that tablets will be the end of PCs and enterprise computing as we know it need to re-think what it is that constitutes a “job” for most information workers. Usually people don’t get paid for consuming stuff, they get paid for creating stuff. iOS on the iPad and Android in particular aren’t there yet. Windows RT might be, because it’s got two things absolutely essential for enterprise (or as I like to call it: real) work:

1. It’s got Explorer (not IE) and support for SMB/CIFS file shares (not everything is on SharePoint and Websites. Most work still happens on boring old file servers.

2. It’s got Microsoft Office. You know? Word, Excel, PowerPoint? Those boring old spreadsheets managers like so much? Reports and presentations? And they work *offline* as well.

There might be a case for the odd line-of-business application that’s used in some companies. Examples for tablet use here are mostly stupid forms-based data-entry (basically checking boxes) or data triage. I have grave doubts that many of these applications currently are geared towards touch interfaces. Unless there is a real business case enabling more efficiency, enterprises won’t pay to change an app for touch use.

The PC is dead? Where?

Couple of things on OS X with something between no purpose  and zero value – IMHO:

• iMessage and Facetime
• Launchpad
• the useless “magic” yellow button on windows between close and minimize that never does what one expects
• The widgets virtual desktop
• OS X notification center – what the hell was wrong with Growl?
• iCloud – if you don’t buy into the whole Apple ecosystem, there’s no point to it

I really don’t see why Apple doesn’t learn from past mistakes. Even if their stuff worked as advertised (and preciously little of it does…) it would still be useless because of the walled garden approach to things. There are plenty of open solutions for communications and the only way to have success in this space is to enable third parties to implement the APIs or at least enable interoperability with other networks.

Then let’s not even get me started on the dumbing-down of OS X. It seems iOS and OS X are on a convergent trajectory. However, that does not mean that the toy operating system for phones and fondleslabs is getting any smarter, it means that OS X is getting dumber. I’m all for simplicity as a design goal – Apple’s software is however a clear example of how not to do it. It is  mind-boggling to me to see the contradictions in design quality and focus between Apple’s hardware and software products.

At last, I no longer have to worry. With the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, there is finally a notebook computer that can give Apple a run for their money. With Windows 8 on it, the OS also looks modern, clean and simple.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s going to be plenty to complain about on the Windows side and I’m going to write about that soon. Still I am hugely impressed with the willingness to change things and avoid compromising on the side of Microsoft. It can’t be easy for them to radically change a product such as Windows, knowing they are going to take crap for months from people who are stuck in the past.

-Jan

I’ve been using SSD pretty exclusively in my client systems for more than three years now. As everyone will tell you, going back to spinning rust is just not possible when you’ve used an SSD equipped system. So I was rather curious about SSD performance on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. I’m not going to post any benchmark results as I don’t have the time to establish proper methodology. What I did notice though:

• Maximum sequential reads I’ve seen are around 380MiB/s. This is both in benchmarks as well as real-world applications such as working on large datasets such as doing stream extraction on MKV files.
• SSD performance goes down to ~50% of max with the system power profile set to balanced to energy saver (~200MiB/s on sequential reads)
• System power draw easily doubles when you’re writing to the SSD. If your workload is write intensive, you can expect much less than the advertised battery runtime.
• The SanDisk X100 SSD built into the X1 Carbon is certainly snappy enough for everything you can reasonably expect to be doing on an Ultrabook. I’m especially fond of how it handles multitasking workloads that require both large sequential reads and writes as well as random I/O (e.g.: Run a torrent on a fast connection and edit an MKV video file using mkvmerge). I’ve seen rather high latencies on some (older) SSDs under similar circumstances before and I’m happy to report I don’t see them on the X1 Carbon.

-Jan

It’s been a while since I had any interesting tech that I was actually able to write about. Today, that changed with the arrival of the brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. For the international audience, I will write this and maybe a few follow-up articles in English as opposed to German.

Specs wise, it’s pretty standard with the 3rd gen Core i5 3427U processor, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. The Ericsson WWAN card is included, the USB 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet adapter is not. I’ll have to check if and when I can expect delivery of that. I did not order from Lenovo directly, so I will have to go through my dealer for that. Anyway, enough has been written about the specs and parts in other places.

Because I haven’t seen any other shots of a final system board, I included my own. As you can see, the RAM is soldered to the board. Opened up, more than half the system is taken up by its battery. Just to make clear: This was “just for fun”, there were no build issues whatsoever with my model that would have necessitated opening up the system. As far as build quality is concerned, this machine easily beats any one of the older ThinkPad models I owned or worked with. For the record: X21, T42p, T60p, T61, T400, T400s, T500, T410, T510, T420, X220, T430. Yes, I know that’s a lot but I spent quite a while in recent years supporting a fleet of ThinkPads for my last employer.

The X1 Carbon has probably the stiffest base I’ve ever experienced on a laptop. There’s less give than I have in my 11” MacBook Air (2011) which is impressive, considering the X1 has a much larger chassis that could bend. Lenovo did change the color finish on the bezel and palm rest surrounding the keyboard. It is now much closer to the soft-touch finish normally found on the display cover. Oddly enough, I prefer its texture and softness to that of the new all-glass touchpad. Now, the latter is a big improvement to the touchpads found previously on ThinkPads (even the newer ones that started to be introduced with T400s). Its somehow not quite as smooth as you would expect from a glass touchpad – something of a problem for me as I have dry skin and I noticed it had something of a sandpaper effect on my fingertips. For those who absolutely have to use a touchpad: The ones build by Apple are still the top of the crop. This being a ThinkPad however, there’s still the good-old TrackPoint and it hasn’t changed a bit.

The LCD screen is of the TN persuasion and it’s a pretty good one. Colors are vivid and the contrasts are excellent to my eyes. Other people have noted the LCD grid. The effect indeed is noticeable if you have really good vision and you’re looking at a mostly white screen (e.g. MS Word). I mostly just noticed it because I read about it and looked for it. In regular use with what I’d call an ergonomic distance between your eyes and the screen it’s much harder to see, certainly if you don’t have perfect eyesight like me. The resolution is still spot on, 1600 by 900 on a 14” screen is the sweet spot for me. It’s enough to enable some multitasking on the road while keeping the machine portable. For serious work I still recommend a 24” or larger external screen.

I can’t say I spent too much time with the stock Windows installation. It’s not as bad as other PCs I’ve seen (HP, Sony) but it’s probably not worth keeping if you are the least bit technical and know how to install Windows and drivers. It’s a long shot from the Microsoft signature builds. Anyway, I wasn’t going to have Windows 7 on this machine anyway and progressed to installing Windows 8 Professional RTM on it:

Here’s a couple of pointers that might help you avoid some of the stumbling blocks I met:

• If you’re going to install Windows 8 on this machine, put the setup files on a USB stick formatted with FAT32 (UEFI won’t boot the installer off NTFS).
• Download all the drivers for the X1 Carbon from the Lenovo Beta site here except for Video and WWAN. Install these drivers first!
• Now download the SCCM driver bundle for Windows 7 here. Also download the Intel Smart Connect drivers here. Unpack and point device manager to these folders to install drivers for all the remaining unrecognized devices.
• Don’t install beta Intel HD graphics drivers, use the update drivers function in device manager and have Windows pull new drivers off Windows Update
• The Windows built-in driver for the Intel 6205 WLAN card has a wrong default setting: It doesn’t have 802.11n mode enabled. If you don’t enable that in device properties, you will likely only see 54Mbit/s connections. Newer drivers from Intel aren’t available yet but should be out along with drivers for Intel Wireless Display by October 26th. Wireless antenna performance is great though, as I have come to expect from a ThinkPad. Full signal on the 5GHz band where my Mac struggles to keep a connection.
• I didn’t manage to get the WWAN card to work using the beta driver for Windows 8, the Windows 7 driver however worked perfectly.

Some general early impressions about system performance and such:

• It’s very quick to boot and shut down running Windows 8. Resume from stand-by is nearly instantaneous.
• Battery runtime for me seems to be around 5 hours right now with the power profile set to balanced, the display at around half its maximum brightness, WLAN and WWAN enabled. This includes time when the system was still syncing data from my SkyDrive and Exchange mailbox in Outlook, indexing and me installing all the little tools I like to have at the ready. Given that we’re still very early as far as driver support for Windows 8 goes (and that I believe Lenovo’s Power Manager still has some extra tricks that are not yet available), I’m pretty happy with that. Recharging the battery using rapid charge takes care of remaining worries.
• As a touch typist and die-hard ThinkPad enthusiast, the new keyboard is easy to get used to. I still miss the 7th-row key placements and keys like “pause” but it’s something you get used to pretty quickly. Key feel and responsiveness is nice and key travel is better than any other Ultrabook (or Macbook) I’ve tried before. I especially like how the keyboard on the X1 Carbon is a part of the bezel. It’s a much cleaner and nicer visual look which I found distracting on the T430.
• You might want to keep credit cards away from the bottom left corner of the base. That’s where you find the magnet keeping the lid closed.

That’s it for my early thoughts. The X1 Carbon for me is the perfect workhorse computer right now. I don’t need computationally intensive applications on a daily basis (that’s what servers and desktops are for!) and I appreciate the portability. I’ll probably buy a second power supply and I’m seriously considering the USB 3.0 dock.

Otherwise this computer is what I always thought the Macbook Air should have been: Black, no-nonsense, non-glare, non-shiny, all serious, with a great keyboard and a little red dot right smack-dab in the middle where it belongs.

-Jan

Ohje, lange ist es her, dass ich hier etwas geschrieben habe. Nun denn, ich habe gerade etwas Zeit und Muße. Vor langer Zeit habe ich über meine Kommissionsarbeit an der TU Kaiserslautern geschrieben, darunter auch über meinen Antrag im Verwaltungsrat des Studierendendenwerks, dessen Ziel es war eine KiTa für die Studierenden zu errichten.

Rückblickend kann ich mittlerweile sagen, dass die Errichtung der Kindertagesstätte “Spielwerk” mein größter und nachhaltendster Erfolg aus der studentischen Gremienarbeit ist. Nicht viele können von sich behaupten, dass auf ihre Initiative ein Millionenbetrag (wenn auch im Rahmen des Konjunkturpakets II) vom Land ausgegeben wurde und mehrere Vollzeit Arbeitsplätze geschaffen wurden.

Ich freue mich jedes Mal diese Einrichtung zu sehen, wenn ich an der Universität vorbeikomme – auch wenn mein Grundstein dafür lediglich ein Blatt Papier war.