I’ve recently had a couple of laptops on loan that have got me thinking about what the perfect enterprise laptop might feature.

Business – Lenovo X220

I was loaned this to try out a super secret new security product. Regular readers here will know that I have a fondness for Lenovo laptops, and this is probably the best one I’ve ever used – an almost perfect balance of performance, size, weight and endurance.

What I like:

• Performance – SSD and 8GB RAM are a potent combination, and I never threw anything at the Core i5 CPU that would cause it to sweat.
• DisplayPort and VGA connectors – so no snags getting hooked up to a variety of displays.
• Great keyboard.
• Wired Gigabit ethernet -making the transfer of some videos to watch on the plane painless.
• Size and weight – 1.5kg.
• Removable SSD – so I could take a snapshot of the machine as it was given to me, and revert back to that later.

What could be even better:

• The screen is OK at 1366 x 768, but I’ve used finer pitch screens before and liked them.
• I didn’t have a chance to test a docking station, so it’s not clear to me whether or not it can drive two displays digitally (like my HP laptop does at work)[1].
• Waking from sleep is a bit hit and miss, and I’ve more than once ended up shutting it down completely rather than waking it up :(

Consumer – Dell XPS13

Enterprise Ultrabook – the best of both worlds?

Conclusion

[1] It seems that the typical office still hasn’t got with having proper large monitors (by which I mean 27″ or 30″), having instead pairs of 19″, 22″ or 24″ screens.
[2] The first time I heard this talked about I heard ‘Wide Eye’ rather than ‘WiDi’ – somehow this made sense for a system able to wirelessly project images.
[3] Traditionally this has been done with a docking station. I think the truly modern way would be a Thunderbolt connection to a monitor that’s then the hub for everything else, but it’s not reasonable to expect new machines to drive an upgrade of everything else so perhaps some sort of (Thunderbolt) docking strip is the way ahead.
[4] The X220 doesn’t seem to have one of these (though it does have a fingerprint reader, which might be an alternative for some, and it also has an ExpressCard slot that I’m sure could be put to work in this area).
[5] Large enterprises have a habit of smashing operating systems down to their constituent parts and (at great cost) reassembling them. They also generally have enterprise licensing deals with Microsoft. I hence can’t see Boot Camp being that much of an obstacle to adoption.