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Lenovo Announces the IdeaPad
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jan 03, 2008 02:41 PM
from the branching-away-from-ibms-old-market dept.
from the branching-away-from-ibms-old-market dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Marking the start of news releases from this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Lenovo has dropped a major announcement on consumers - the arrival of a new line of notebooks. The IdeaPads will be the consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads. The announcement covers three notebooks, the 17" Y710, the 15" Y510, and the 11", 2.4lb U110. The IdeaPads will bring a number of firsts to Lenovo's notebooks, including a SSD upgrade option, dual hard drives (Y710 only), and a 17" notebook."
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Firehose:Lenovo Announces the IdeaPad by Anonymous Coward
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Thinkpad X300 Specs Leaked 372 comments
Kyokushi writes "Gizmodo reports that some specifications of a new ultralight Lenovo X300 have been leaked. 'It appears that Lenovo have themselves a new ultralight X300 series Thinkpad — and outside of the price and release date, we have all of the specs that you need to know. At a glance, some of the major features include: a 13.3-inch LED backlit 1440X900 screen, an ultralight 2.5 pound form factor, and Intel Merom Santa Rosa Dual Core CPU (2.0 Ghz / 880 Mhz ), a 64 GB SSD, up to 4GB of DDR2 PC2-5300 memory, and 4 hours of battery life.' If this is true, then Lenovo looks to have some heavy competition for the Macbook Air." Update: 01/20 22:55 GMT by S : Corrected Gizmondo->Gizmodo.
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At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads. (Score:5, Informative)
ThinkPads were developed by IBM, produced for professionals and built like tanks. Lenovo has made a few changes, not all of them good, but basically that design philosophy is intact and a lot of the same people from IBM still work on ThinkPads. The "IdeaPad" line is a rebadge of Lenovo's *own* line (the 3000 series, etc.), which was developed wholly separately, by a different company and in a different country. If the previous lineup was anything to judge by, they're the same basic cheap junk laptops you might find from any second-tier Taiwanese or Chinese company. Adequate for most use, but not even in the same league as a ThinkPad. (I may be a former TP owner, but I'm also a *current* Acer owner, so I'm familiar with both ends of the spectrum here.)
It's not just a case of one being professional and the other consumer, which implies that the differences are mainly in the included software or security features. No, these laptops are built to completely different standards. They're as different as when IBM and Lenovo were making laptops separately. Would a new line from Lenovo have been compared to the ThinkPad in those days? Well, nothing much has changed, except that Lenovo's obviously trying to cash in on the ThinkPad name, and has managed to hoodwink sites like Slashdot into thinking the two lines are somehow related.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads. (Score:5, Funny)
"You WILL like Face Recognition Security! Now do as your Mistress Lenovo tells you!"
Yawn (Score:5, Funny)
Major hype at business conference before it's release? Nope
TV ad featuring two amusing characters bantering back and forth played at all hours of the day? Nope
CEO with reality distortion field? Nope
I'm bored... moving on.
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Interesting)
face recognition (Score:3, Interesting)
This raises the question: could one just hold up a photograph of the user to log in?
Re:face recognition (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:face recognition (Score:5, Interesting)
Try it with a camcorder w/ built-in LCD panel and I suspect you'll get different results. Use a bigger screen that can show your face at actual life size, and it is almost certain. Most decent face recognition systems can detect a picture because the perspective never changes, but unless it has more than one camera, it will likely be easily fooled by a video clip....
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine a secret partition on the hard drive that holds (profiled) characteristics of terrorists faces. So the laptop keeps track of whoever is using it, checks
Re:face recognition (Score:5, Funny)
Consumer friendly?? (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF wasn't consumer friendly about the ThinkPad? Granted, I've been a big ThinkPad fan for some time myself, but really, what are they talking about? How do you make a notebook more consumer-friendly? For that matter, how could a notebook not be consumer friendly and sell?
Re:Consumer friendly?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Consumer friendly?? (Score:5, Funny)
Please no (Score:5, Interesting)
My customers love their Thinkpads, but I'm going to hate having to tell them that the Lenovos with 17" screens and bright colors on the chassis just aren't the same as the decent ones. Because I know I'll have customers (having years of experience that says "Thinkpad = good laptop") that won't understand the difference until it's too late.
No Trackpoint. (Score:5, Insightful)
No trackpoint = no sale.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Next Up: FreedomPad (Score:5, Funny)
Where's the Cheap Webpads? (Score:4, Insightful)
What we need are lightweight little touchtablets running VNC. That weigh a handful of ounce, unfold from 8" to 17", last a week on a charge, and cost under $100. All they have to do is display a remote tappable desktop, with mutable little speakers, maybe bluetooth headphones/keyboards for occasional use. Live on WiFi.
There's a thousand models of the "mobile desktop relacement". What we need is little devices that are just little controllers for all the media and info consumption we do when we're away from workstations, and want to do more than talk or look up some factoid on a phone. If they were cheap enough, people would buy a bunch to leave all over the place where we might just pick them up.
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
At last! (Score:3, Funny)
Rejected names (Score:4, Funny)
Faced with the task of coming up with a consistent naming scheme, the following ideas were rejected but could appear as future products:
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ordinary Motors! Common Oil!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Thomas J. Watson coined the motto Think while managing the sales and advertising departments at the National Cash Register Company, saying "Thought has been the father of every advance since time began. 'I didn't think' has cost the world millions of dollars." In 1914 he brought the motto with him to CTR, which later became IBM." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Think [wikipedia.org]
Think about it, it seems obvious.
CC.
Re:Seems like it could be a winner. (Score:5, Insightful)
All in all, still a solid laptop brand from my experience. It will be interesting to see how these home user styled boxes fare. I wish more B&M stores carried the brand though. Compusa was the only one in my area that had them.