Keeping in line with the exit review series, I’ve written an exit review of my IBM T60p laptop, which was recently retired.

The T60p was purchased back in March 2006, right when the first dual-core mobile chips started shipping. The IBM model number was 2623-DDU, and it featured an Intel T2500 (2GHz), 2GB RAM, 100GB 7200rpm HD, 15″ 1600×1200 LCD, 512MB ATI FireGL V5200, CDRW/DVDRW, Intel 802.11abg wireless, WWAN, Bluetooth/Modem, 1Gb Ethernet, UltraNav, Secure chip, Fingerprint reader, 9 cell Li-Ion batt, and WinXP Pro. Like most of my key gadgets, the T60p followed me everywhere around the world; I spend probably 16 hours a day with it, so it got plenty of wear and tear.

I retired my T60p because Microsoft is retiring Windows XP, and I really don’t want to downgrade to Vista (“congratulations, your new faster hardware now runs slower than ever thanks to Vista!”), so I decided to get the latest, greatest Windows XP laptop available today, and hunker down and hope it lasts me until Microsoft figures out how to get Vista right (or they realize what a terrible mistake they’ve made and bring back XP…sort of like how Intel brought out the Pentium 4 but now all the new designs are Pentium III derivatives). Or maybe before that, Linux support for all of my key apps will get so good, I can finally depart from the Windows ecosystem.

So the reason for getting rid of the T60p isn’t because it had any functional flaw; it’s actually in fair working order, and its performance is still decent.

Here were some of my favorite features about the T60p:

Well, that’s my experience with the IBM T60p. I think my experience can be summarized by the fact that my new laptop is an IBM T61p — they won a repeat customer. The T61p is still settling in. I like the extra performance it brings, but it has some quirks of its own that I’m still learning to get used to. It’s funny, but every time I get a new laptop, I have to learn all of its little bugs and find ways to patch my behavior to avoid aggravating them. For example, I’ve trained myself to unplug my webcam before hitting the eject button on the minidock, because failing to do so causes a blue screen without fail. So far, none of the quirks have been so bad that I’ve given up on the machine. In addition to the webcam issue, I did have a spate of blue screens to deal with when I first got the laptop (mostly around minidock ejection and going into and out of standby), and I had to do some digging around in the Minidump logs to figure out exactly what behavior was triggering them. I wonder what other users do when this sort of thing happens to them?

I recently saw a demo of Android booting up in a CoWare environment, and I couldn’t help but notice this line in the Android boot console:

...
Freeing init memory: 96K
init: HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN
init: reading config file
...

That’s a little scary. If you don’t get the reference, it’s the infamous first words of CATS, followed by the immortal phrase “all your base are belong to us“.

I mean, I love the google search application, but I am a little bit disturbed by the masses of people trusting all their bits to google — their email, their desktops, their photos … soon their phones (no, I don’t use gmail — I must be the last person on earth who doesn’t — but the idea of ads showing up based on what’s in my email is disquieting for a variety of reasons). And I think that surely the Android developers cannot claim ignorance to the context of the phrase: all your base are belong to us // you are on your way to destruction // you have no chance to survive make your time.

Now, Don’t be Evil!

Incidentally, CoWare is a really neat tool; one of their other demos is a hardware simulation of the chumby platform. It’s absolutely amazing that they have a cycle-accurate simulation of the chumby hardware platform that boots our code and runs almost real-time. Since it’s a hardware simulation, you can jump in and inspect the state of signals between components, wiggle lines, and set breakpoints based on hardware state (as well as software state). This is one of those cool things that come out of having an open platform; without access to our source code and documentation, creating this demo without the help of chumby would have been much more difficult. And while some consumer electronics companies would go batty over someone emulating their platform, I say to them hats off for such a clever hack and such a powerful product.

I heard the best quote ever on today’s All Things Considered story on easing travel restrictions for Chinese tourists. Rob Schmitz reported that Chinese tour operator Vincent Bao may need to eliminate some destinations on his itinerary:

The last time he took a Chinese group to downtown LA, for example, Bao says they got off the bus, rolled their eyes, and said it reminded them of any number of small Chinese cities. They then demanded to be taken to Rodeo drive, so they could shop.

You know, before I went to China, I would have thought this was hyperbole — I grew up in a small town in the American Midwest, surrounded by undeveloped fields, so back then it was hard for me to imagine a place like LA being called small and unimpressive. Now that I’ve been around China, however, I’d have to say their assessment of America’s #2 city (by population) is just about right. Interesting thing is, I never really thought about it that way, until I heard this quote; it’s hard to see your own country through another countryman’s eyes. It’s also interesting to see all those dollars spent by Americans in Wal-Mart flow to China and come back home to Rodeo Drive, to be spent on high-end European luxury goods. I guess the weakening US dollar is good for something.

I think it’s time to start a new kind of gadget review: the exit review.

Gadgets always seem to arrive on the scene with a lot of splash and hype, but rarely do you find an article telling you how the gadget fared in Real Life. The Exit Review is something I’m going to try doing every time I retire a major gadget of mine; the idea of it is to reflect upon how the gadget performed over its duration of service. Of course, reviews like this are all hindsight, so they don’t drive sales — which probably explains why nobody does them, because there’s no money to be made doing them. However, as a design engineer I think there are lessons to be learned through reflection, and as a consumer I believe that apples don’t fall to far from the tree — a good gadget maker will get my business again, and a bad one will never see another dime from me.

Recently, my 2-year contract with AT&T wireless expired, so I’m up for a new phone. It’s time to retire my trusty Blackberry 8700c. To set the mood for the exit review, you really must see pictures of how the device looks today.

Click on the photo above for a much larger version.

Laser engraving works great on the Blackberry.

Yes, I’m very hard on my gadgets. I think the cosmetic state of the phone was eloquently summarized by a saleslady in China who blurted, “This looks like shit!”, upon inspecting my phone. Yes, those are in fact two enormous cracks in the front screen protector (they aren’t in the LCD itself — just in the outer protective case), and I’ve been happily using my phone like that for months.

Those cracks are like badges of honor — a real phone keeps working despite being drop-kicked from four feet or being rattled around inside a suitcase against an electric shaver while being dragged over cobblestone streets in Italy. The cracks don’t interfere with the functionality of the phone; they are thin so they don’t distort the text of emails that I’m reading. It’s a testament to the reliability of the phone. This is in contrast to the Apple iPhone, which is definitely a pretty face with a glass jaw. I’ve seen plenty of iPhones with shattered screens, and most of them after a couple months of use look like a dented and beat up old tin can. That is, unless you put your iPhone into one of those ridiculous iPhone condoms that everyone seems to use. What’s with that, anyways? People pay top dollar for a good-looking phone that’s super-slim, and immediately stick it into a bulky and horrific-looking rubber condom.

The crazy thing is those obvious battle scars don’t tell half the story. Every one of those little black nicks on the side of the phone (not really visible in the photos above) is made by a drop onto asphalt. I sleep on a lofted bed, six and a half feet up, and many mornings I wake to find that I’ve kicked my phone off the bed onto the ground. So there’s about a hundred drops there. It’s been hurled across the room, drenched in sweat to the point where it’s condensed on the inside of the screen, thrown in the sand, sat on, stepped on and kicked across the asphalt. So it’s durable.

It’s traveled with me to over a dozen countries in Europe and Asia, and the Quad-Band GSM radio has worked great in every country that uses a GSM standard (I did have to unlock the phone). The data service works overseas as well, too, so I can get my email fix. When I’m in the remote regions of South China I think I grip my Blackberry like a safety blanket, holding on to my final bastion of familiar English text in an overwhelming flood of mandarin characters.

Significantly, it’s still on its original battery. The amount of charge the battery can hold is definitely reduced, but it still lasts for about a day and a half of regular use without needing a charge. You can see in the photo above that the phone’s still at 3/4 full at the end of the day.

The most impressive thing about it, however, is how many times the phone has crashed on me since I’ve owned it: zero. There have been about five times in two years where the radio gets confused, and I’ve had to pull the battery — fortunately, that bug happens only when I’m using the phone to browse the web, and the UI is still working so you know something’s wrong. Also, I’ve never had a bad web page crash the phone outright. I’ve had the phone seize for about twenty seconds on some really nasty webpages, but then the Blackberry OS kills the browser thread and the phone is back to normal.

Thus, even when the phone is struggling, the screen never freezes up: I have never been mislead into thinking the phone is okay when it’s actually just frozen on the home screen. This is the killer failure that plagues users of Treos or Microsoft Mobile powered phones. I hear so many stories of users routinely missing urgent calls and forgetting appointments because their PDA phone crashed on the home screen — so they were fooled into thinking they were lucky and having an unusually quiet day. Maybe you could think of missing calls for a day as an “involuntary vacation mode feature”…I call it bollocks.

It seems ludicrous to me that anyone would accept using a phone that crashes! First and foremost, a phone…is a phone. It makes and receives calls. It must do that, without fail.

And because the engineers at Blackberry built a phone that does just that — make and receive calls without fail — and then also has a good email client in it with a full keyboard, my next phone, currently on order, is a Blackberry Curve 8310. I’m a little worried about that fancy trackball in the middle; I can certainly see me writing an unfavorable exit review of that feature in a couple of years, but I’m willing to take that risk for a phone that I can trust to ring when a loved one or a friend is in trouble and needs my help.