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The fingerprint scanner
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ExpressCard slot with distinct eject button

Like previous T-Series ThinkPads, IBM has equipped the T43 with a TrackPoint and a touchpad for ultimate flexibility. I definitely prefer TrackPoints to touchpads, and once again, the examples on ThinkPads are far superior to those offered by other notebook manufacturers. The TrackPoint on this T43 has a soft, tactile feel to it and the analogue movement is very linear, making it easy to move the pointer fast, slow or any speed in between. Below the Spacebar are three buttons pertaining to the TrackPoint. The left and right buttons correspond to the left and right buttons on a mouse, while the middle button acts as a scroll lock, allowing you to scroll up and down through documents with the TrackPoint. The touchpad is also of high quality, and anyone who prefers this control method will not be disappointed. There are two selector buttons below the touchpad, but no scroll lock button. The latter is not needed as the right hand side of the touchpad can be used to scroll through documents in the same manner.

On the right side of the wrist rest is the swipe based fingerprint scanner. IBM introduced biometric security in the T42 late last year, and I think it works very well. As with any security measure it's not infalible, but for a large corporate roll-out it will probably result in far fewer support calls from users who've forgotten their passwords. For a full rundown of the biometric hardware and software in IBM ThinkPads, check out my review of the original biometric T42 here.

On the right of the chassis you'll find a D-SUB port and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive. The latter is a very slimline unit, which helps keep the overall thickness down to 1in. Of course IBM does offer a DVD writer as an option as well. You can also slide a second battery into the UltraBay instead of an optical drive to significantly increase the battery life. IBM quotes 7.8 hours battery life using the high-capacity battery pack along with the UltraBay battery - I imagine that this configuration would also be quite popular with corporate users.

The front is devoid of features apart from the IrDA port, but on the left is the first indication that the T43 is very different from the T42, despite the similar looks. Where there had previously been two stacked Type II PC Card slots, there is now a single Type II PC Card slot and a single ExpressCard slot. The ExpressCard slot makes it clear that the T43 is based on the new Intel Sonoma platform, which includes the faster ExpressCard standard - set to be the ultimate replacement for the PC Card.

Also on the left are headphone and microphone sockets, along with a network port for the Gigabit Ethernet controller, a modem socket, an S-Video output and two USB 2.0 ports. At the rear is the power socket and IBM's ode to legacy devices - a parallel port.

As I've already mentioned, the T43 implements the new Centrino standard, codenamed Sonoma. One of the big advantages of Sonoma is PCI Express support, and the ExpressCard slot makes use ot the PCI Express bus for improved performance over the ageing CardBus standard. Of course the graphics solution is also PCI Express, and this T43 is equipped with an ATI Mobility Radeon X300 chipset. This isn't the fastest mobile graphics chipset out there, but it will be adequate for the target market - you can expect the T43p to be shipping with ATI's latest mobile workstation chipset, replacing the FireGL T2 that was seen in both the T41p and T42p.

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