Newest Additions Part 5: UX50 and X140e

The next three things came as a group, but one was bought locally. Technically, the local one is a part for the thing that came from a friend. Since this was a part for something else, I didn't include it in the original list of new additions.

I picked up a 120GB PNY SSD at Best Buy since a friend of mine wanted to do a trade. So he sent me a very nice Clie UX50 and ThinkPad X140e. In return, I am sending him back the NVidia Shield and a graphics card that he had sent me.

When he mentioned the trade, I was a little unsure what to do but I had given it some thought, and in the end, I was powerless to resist. Resistance is futile when you involve two of my favorite things! I will start with the Clie first since it was what really started off the trade. Originally, we were going to trade for just the Clie, and I was going to send him the Sharp IS01 I have, but then he mentioned the ThinkPad for the Shield.

Now, the Clie for me is special. Anyone who knows me well enough knows that this was the number 1 PDA on my list. I have wanted to get one of these for a good 11 years now but never wanted to spend the money on it. I am in love with it, and the fact that it is pretty much brand new made it even better yet! It was the one Clie that I have wanted most of all for the keyboard, but I have been spoiled by the Droid 4. That isn't to say I don't still love it mind you. I just need to use it more and I will adjust to it.

Even if I don't adjust, I can still use it to get my thoughts down faster than using onscreen keyboard on my Nexus 7 sadly. I have said it more times than I should have too but on screen keyboards SUCK! That isn't the point of this though, so moving on. It was the only landscape clamshell Clie, not counting the UX40 as the only difference was the lack of Wi-Fi. The other ones always used a portrait screen so they had a far narrower keyboard. Personally, I prefer the landscape in the case of only comparing Sony devices since I have had 3 other keyboard equipped Clies. They would be the NR70, NX70, and NX80.

This one uses the Sony Handheld Engine CPU running at 123MHz at most. The premise with this was the processor scales to the load to save battery life. This was also a way for Sony to get away from paying someone for a processor as well. Sony has always loved doing things they're own way though, like memory stick instead of SD card support, or using custom APIs for things like wireless and music.

This was due partly to the fact that the stuff was added by Sony to Palm OS, but also due to the fact that when Palm started to finally catch up, they chose to use their own API as well. This meant that when software like Pocket Tunes started to gain more popularity, it wouldn't run on the Clie models. Luckily, they did start using the Palm sound API in OS 5.2 Clie models. I need to check the UX50 later and see if that was one of the ones they changed it on.

The other thing that was in the box as stated was the Lenovo ThinkPad X140e. This one is still current and even had 110 warranty days left when I got it. The computer was used for 2 months before he gave the hard drive to a friend of his and put it away. Since he didn't get a drive for it, he let it sit in a box since. Since it requires a 7MM thick hard drive as opposed to the far more common 9.5MM drive, I had decided to opt for the SSD. It really is a better option anyway so in the end I am glad that I did but I would have loved to have a large spacious 1TB drive instead.

So by adding the 120GB SSD, I have a very nice and extremely well built little laptop. I love the thing, and it has great specs too! It runs on an AMD A4-5000 quadcore APU and has 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and with the SSD it really runs well.

Since it gets great battery life, and has a great keyboard, I really see this one being amazing for writing. It may end up replacing my Surface for some use, but one thing I know for sure is I still really love the Surface so this is more of a compliment to it.