Designed as powerful desktop replacement notebooks, the Thinkpad A series laptops from IBM combine performance with notebook versatility. The latest improvements to the range see the introduction of the new Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor-M.

Housed in the familiar black, composite, titanium chassis, the Thinkpad A30P is powered by a 1.6GHz P4-M backed by 256MB of PC2100 DDR SDRAM. It can accommodate up to a maximum of 1GB of memory through two DIMM slots. The CPU speed drops to 1.2GHz when running under battery power and the 4,000mAh battery gives a reasonable life of two and a half hours.

The Thinkpad A30P comes with two modular drive bays; an Ultrabay and an Ultrabay Plus. Both of these can accept a number of other drives as well a second battery, but the Ultrabay Plus has the added advantage that it can also accept either a Workpad (Palm) cradle or a numeric keypad.

Only the basic Ultrabay was used in the review system, occupied by a DVD/CD-RW 8x/8x/24x/8x combo drive. For internal storage there is 40GB IBM hard drive, so working with large amounts of data shouldn't pose too much of a problem. There are also two Type II PC Card slots, which are stacked so they can also take a Type III card.

The 1400 x 1050 pixel TFT screen is driven by a 32MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics adapter. This is an AGP 4X chipset that uses DDR memory, which gives the Thinkpad A30P true 3D performance: maybe not enough to run the more power-hungry 3D games, but at least you can play some of them - and that's a rarity in a notebook.

One of the Thinkpad A30P's strongest points is its connectivity; in addition to an Intel Pro/100VE network adapter and a 56Kbps, V.92-capable modem, it also comes with wireless networking, so there should be no problem connecting the Thinkpad A30P with the outside world.

All the usual I/O connectors are on the rear panel; serial, parallel, VGA, two USB, modem, LAN and S-Video, while the sides of the chassis house the three audio ports and infra-red port, but strangely no FireWire port.

The keyboard is well positioned and the whole unit has a high degree of build quality; the keys are responsive, as is the trackpoint and the three mouse buttons. Situated on the left hand side of the keyboard are six Internet navigation buttons; mail, home, search, favourites, reload and stop, the first three of which can be user-configured. Above the keyboard are the volume controls and a button to access the online Thinkpad help software.

The IBM Thinkpad A30P is a powerful, well-specified but pricey addition to the Thinkpad range of desktop replacement laptops. It combines good performance with an outstanding array of connectivity features.