Live from TechEd: the X41

Scoble’s raving about how sexy the new Lenovo Thinkpad X41 is. He’s right, but here’s the weird thing: where’s Lenovo? In Ballmer’s keynote yesterday, the X41 was on stage for a total of about 90 seconds. Instead of showing it, it got a brief mention and then Ballmer took it off-stage. The script surrounding its appearance sounded like a bad TV commercial. This would have been a perfect opportunity to showcase what makes the X41 special, or at least to include it in a demo of some kind. We’ve had a great deal of success including the Tablet in our line-of-business demos; for example, BJ Holtgrewe could have showed his stuff on a Tablet and then disconnected it to roam around the stage, just to highlight his claims about what Maestro and the Outlook managed-code support in Visual Studio could do. I know that IBM’s former Thinkpad marketing folks now work for Lenovo, but suddenly they seem to have gone tone-deaf. What’s up with that?
Update: I spent a few minutes playing with an X41 Tablet at IBM’s booth. Terrific form factor, and it has the same solid feel as my T41 (and its predecessor T30, and the T20 I had before that, and the 600E I had before that). I think IBM’s going to sell a lot of these.