Did Engadget just posted the first pictures of the upcoming Thinkpad Reserve Edition? Looks like it... There has been some speculation on the hardware/gadget blogs about the Thinkpad Reserve Edition, but overall people have been pretty quiet about it. I am probably a lot more excited about it than most people and I am not expecting a major reinvention- after all the Thinkpad I owned for college does not look drastically different than the T61 I just finished testing... Lenovo has not released anything official about the Reserve, but we do know a few things. It is not

• Yoga
• Just hardware
• Endorsed by Ricardo Montalban
• Glued on patches of leather
• Pleather
• For everyone

Let's translate that...

• It's not Yoga, so it looks like a normal Thinkpad
• just hardware so there is some new software
• no cheap leather (?)
• the leather is not glued on- it's a removable case (think Vaja)
• fake leather
• it's expensive ($5000 as rumor has it)

Considering all that, the pictures recently posted at Engadget make perfect sense. There are three of them and they look exactly like what I would expect from the Thinkpad team. And with the official release a week away, could this possibly be more convenient? That said, the design of the case is so simplistic that this could easily be a fake- just a piece of leather sewn to fit and slapped on an X60 (or X61). Would anyone really go through the trouble though?

As for the design, it looks pretty okay. It's a Thinkpad. In a leather case. Will there be some super cool software? There will be something, but I don't have any good guesses right now. Maybe special services that come with it, like repair, support, or concierge? Well, probably not that last one...

Just to examine the picture for a second- it appears to be an X60- check out the WWAN antenna on the top right. It pokes through the case and can be extended. What is strange is that the fingerprint scanner is centered on the notebook- the one on the X61 and X61s I am testing is to the right of the mouse buttons.

I am wondering about two things now also- 1) do you have to use the extended battery? Or will there be multiple versions of the case? 2) What is holding the case to the notebook? I don't see any straps or anything.