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Mobile it may be; but it weighs 7 lb!

It's big and it's clever, and yes, it has wireless; IBM's newest A31p notebook is a "mobile workstation" where everything is secondary to performance. So it's a lump, and it's a battery hog. Does this matter?

A mobile workstation is a PC for people who want to do seismic analysis on an oil rig; it's for people who want to go to LAN parties and play Quake without carrying a desktop machine; it's for financial traders, engineers, and anybody who needs grunt in the processor department, not in their shoulders.

IBM's newest high performance machine won't be available for benchmarking for another couple of weeks; delivery is promised by "April" according to UK and Ireland brand manager, Mike Walker.

The one we saw this morning was the top-of-range Pentium 4 1.7 GHz machine, with 256 meg minimum of ram, upgradeable to a GB by the user. And no, it's not an utterly no-compromise box; the machine uses mobile P4 technology - nowhere near the performance of Intel's biggest 2.2GHz chip, because of "SpeedStep" clocking it way back under battery.

Checking the display sample out under battery, it quickly became apparent that you wouldn't use this one if you didn't have mains power nearby. The standard battery gives an optimistic estimate of a two-hour life. Unless IBM has radically changed the way it estimates battery life, if you actually use the thing aggressively, you'll get less than that. So they've done the next best thing, and allowed you to add a second battery in the expansion UltraBay slot, which (they reckon, and I doubt) will give you a total of five hours. We'll see when the review sample arrives.

The biggest mystery is why the machine has an ATI FireGL or Radeon display graphics chip.

Best guess seems to be that they would have used an nVidia graphics unit if one had been ready. It's my bet that there will be upgrades to this A31p (the "p" stands for "professional" within a very few weeks, and that one of the models you might consider waiting for, might well be one with an nVidia processor. Without wanting to sound cynical, we were not encouraged by the fact that IBM ran the Madonion 3D Mark benchtest, but didn't display the results ...

Another feature missing, is FireWire (IEEE 1394 standard serial link) which will not only speed up data transfer to other devices, but will allow the P4 processor to get on with other work while the data is transferring. The machine currently has USB, standard version - which uses the P4 to do the bus driving; in battery mode with Speedstep throttling the processor back, this could have a huge impact on program crunching performance.

The company wasn't giving too much away about FireWire, beyond a promise that a FireWire model would be available within weeks - possibly, announced in April.

Wireless? Of course! - both Bluetooth and WiFi devices installed as standard in the box, with antenna up on the lid "but not the way some manufacturers do it, behind the TFT screen, where it gets blocked out," said Walker.

Price; not low! - about what you'd expect for a high-spec machine, at around £2,635 - and then you have to add VAT. Probably, not a high-volume seller, then.

IBM has a webcast of the new box available for those who'd like to sneak a peek.