Tumi Alpha International Wheeled Office Review

International Wheeled Office with
cable pouch

To go with my new Lenovo T510 I now also bought a carry-on with space for the laptop. As it goes with purchases like this I spend a lot of time researching them on the net, it just seems to be the German or nerd to do. Also quite typical for a German is to choose something which is of better quality than you need, but also not the most expensive one out there. Other bags I considered where by Rimowa, Victorinox, Samsonite and Briggs & Riley.
The reason why I am writing about this at all is that the Tumi website doesn't include the information I needed and there seems to be a lack of information about this bag on the, so this is more about the facts as an actual review.

Size: height: 54.6 cm, width: 37.5 cm, depth: 25 cm ( compressed ), 28 cm ( normal ), 32 cm ( expanded )
Weight: 5kg ( including cable pouch, lock and bits and pieces )

The size and weight might be a problem if you want to use it as a carry-on, because some airlines are annoyingly strict with there size and weight restrictions.  Some have a 20cm depth limit or a 8kg weight limit. Easyjet and BA are probably OK, Germanwings and Ryanair maybe not so (but you shouldn't use Ryanair anyway).  

The protected laptop compartment fits the T510, but the laptop is a bit wide which makes it a tight fit. Using the 9 cell battery is not a problem. A 15" Macbook Pro should fit without problems.   

If you decide to buy it, try to get it from the US as the prices are tumi.com: $695 (528€) , tumi.de: 725€, uk.tumi.com: £695 (818€).

Review: it is quite nice

If you need any other details or measurements, give me a shout with a comment.

Fedora 14 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T510

by Jemimus, on Flickr

Another brand new toy. After my last trip to the UK for bikesoup I decided that it was about time to get a proper laptop.
So far I only have a netbook, which is very convenient when size and weight matter. But for getting work done it is just to small, the main problem is the screen size and resolution.
I had a look around for good full sized laptops and the only brands producing something with the quality I had in mind were Apple and Lenovo. The advantages of the Apple over Lenovo are better built quality, battery life and easy to buy locally. I choose the Lenovo, because you can order it with more gadgets, swappable batteries and mostly because it isn't an Apple as I despise where the company is going and I already had bad experiences with Linux and iPods.
This is the configuration I finally got.

• Intel Core i7-620M
• 15.6" FHD Display  1920x1080
• 4 GB
• UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad) with Fingerprint Reader
• 500 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
• Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (3x3 AGN)
• Integrated Mobile Broadband (Gobi 2000 3G with GPS) 

First thing I did was to install Fedora 14 on it. I used the install option to shrink the Windows partition to 50G and used the rest for Linux. I am probably going to replace the hard-disk with a SSD in the future, but it was a bit too expensive for now.
The install was amazingly boring. I was expecting all kind of problems with the hardware, but everything just worked. Even the fingerprint reader allows you to login after configuring it with a nice tool.
The only tweaks I needed so far, are these:

• The UMTS card needs a firmware and loader, I used these instructions from the CentOS list.  I don't really need it, because mobile broadband via bluetooth is also very easy to set up and works just as fast.
• I haven't tried the GPS yet, but I seem to be inside of buildings most of the time anyway
• if you enable VT-D (whatever that is) in the BIOS, hibernate / suspend to disk won't work
• for some reason some of the preferences don't work for the touchpad, but you can enable those and more with the synclient tool. For example "synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1"

Battery time is a bit disappointing, with either a 6 or 9 cell battery. Some of it seems to be the fault of the Linux software, but PC hardware always seems to be rubbish in that department.
The build quality is also not on the level of a MacBook pro, but much better than any Dell, Asus or whatever they are called.

I will comment on this post in case I make any new discoveries.