ThinkPad X6 UltraBase Tablet

ThinkPad X6 Tablet UltraBase The ThinkPad X6 Tablet UltraBase is a portable dock for the X60 Tablet and X61 Tablet ThinkPads providing extra ports as well as a bay for an optical drive and a set of stereo speakers. Containing a full featured Ultrabay Slim slot, it provides flexibility in drive choice as well as the option of a secondary battery for extended working time on the road. Features Passthrough ports: Ethernet (RJ45) Modem (RJ11) USB (four ports) VGA Serial (DB9-M) Parallel (DB25-F) Microphone Headphone Ultrabay Slim Stereo speakers Kensington security hole Pros & Cons Positives: Expansion capability, portable Negatives: makes the ThinkPad quite thick Compatibility: X60 Tablet, X61 Tablet Flaws Using Windows XP Tablet Edition one may stop the optical (CD/DVD) drive, remove the slim component, insert an alternate (HDD) slim component, and resume operations. This feature is not available under Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) linux as of this writing. One may unmount and eject an Ultrabay Slim HDD using either command line or desktop tools. However, there is no way to unmount and eject an optical drive. This is due, in part, to the way that CD/DVD devices are made known to the OS when media get inserted and are in limbo without media present. NOTE that there are several attempts to implement a CD/DVD stop, but they rely on detailed knowledge of device identification to the running kernel and complex command line statements. It would be nice if there were external USB or Firewire enclosures to accept the Ultrabay Slim components. Currently, this is not the case. Other vendors, notably DELL, offer an external enclosure for some editions of their drive-bay components. Ultrabay Slim The Ultrabay Slim slot in this dock is a full featured one and supports hot swapping with all Ultrabay Slim drives. You can also feed it with the Ultrabay Slim battery pack to extend the overall battery life time.