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."
I don't know how i feel about this, I love Thinkpads and I'm glad there not changing them to make them more consumer friendly, yet i worry this will draw their attention away from the Thinkpads.
What I don't understand is how they consider the Thinkpad to be consumer unfriendly. Aren't Thinkpads universally hailed as the best quality non-apple laptop around?
Is "consumer friendly" just a code word for "cheap"?
I have to agree. I especially like the looks of the Ideapad 110. I'm not sure about this "Face Recognition Security" though. I tend to shave every 4 or 5 days, and sometimes I've got glasses and sometimes not. Sometimes my eyes are red and bloodshot and sometimes they're... well, they're usually red and bloodshot.
It would suck if I couldn't log into my notebook just because I was wearing my leather bondage hood and bridle.
I sort of agree, with the addition that I really hope people don't outright *confuse* these with ThinkPads. Even to see a Slashdot post about them, mentioning them as some sort of adjunct to the ThinkPad line is kind of disturbing. This really doesn't even deserve a mention here, any more than a new line by Acer or ASUS would. I say that as a former ThinkPad owner.
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.
Dude, go to CompUSA and TOUCH one of these. It's a kewl looking laptop. Actually, I saw another model, but it LOOKS like the 15.4" model. It has the same orange, semi-circle volume control. It weighs nicely, feels nice, and looks REALLY nice. I'd have bought it instead of the Gateway (cough, cough, ACER P-6301), but it was around $900, or some $300 outside of my limit. I hope people give the Lenovo brand a chance. They are a nice design change from many of the tired, old designs rolled out over the past 2 ye
Cool fruity colors? Nope 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
You say that sarcastically, but there is a big grain of truth. As someone who used to sell laptops, the market has almost no differentiation. Every three months, HP, Dell, Toshiba and the rest release new models in step. You try explaining to someone the difference between three notebooks that all have the same 15" screen, processor, hard drive and RAM. If this thing doesn't sell itself, then no one else will go to the trouble.
The IdeaPads have a new feature: Face Recognition. The idea is that the user can sit in front of the computer and log into Windows Vista without entering the password.
This raises the question: could one just hold up a photograph of the user to log in?
Some recent ThinkPads have face recognition as well. I recently purchased this one [tigerdirect.com], and it has this feature. For those of you that are interested, it recognizes me with or without glasses, right after waking up and right before stepping out for New Years' Eve. We tried fooling it with a 4x6 photo held close to the web cam, and it didn't work. YMMV.
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....
I don't like the idea of the computer monitor that can not only see you, but RECOGNIZE you! Say goodbye to any real anonymity when you computer monitor can see you...and what you're doing. I could see that as a sticky area for privacy advocates..
Also I don't want to lose the joke of "watching someone though their monitor"...
If this were made in the US instead of China, we could have some real DHS paranoid ramblings...
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 it against its secret database, and next time it's connected to the internet, files a report with DHS.
The IdeaPads will be the consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads.
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?
The main objections I've run into with Thinkpads from non-professional users are: 1. Small screens, from people who don't understand why a notebook needs to be portable. 2. Poor multimedia options, from people who expect a notebook to play Doom 3 in 1080p with surroundsound on a notebook. 3. High price, which is a complaint I might see as legitimate (though, I think that the support Lenovo provides more than justifies the added cost).
Well, judging from the specs of the IdeaPads, evidently high resolution and a trackpoint must be consumer-unfriendly, and low res and touchpad only are consumer friendly....
I think I'll stick with the ThinkPad line, thanks anyway...
I see that historically the non-thinkpad Lenovo's are cheaper, and I guess that's what they mean, but I don't see anything to distinguish them from every other cheaper laptop in existence.
i was thinking the exact same thing. my first thought was, oops, does that make my both thinkpads now turn unfriendly on me ? we have been getting along so nicely so far, running various opsyses without any problems, travelling around and holding up nicely, and now, suddenly unfriendly ? wtf.
Thats the common problem with overinflated product announcements, practically any hyperbole they apply will make previous products from the same company look silly.
Not a troll... since the EEE showed the way, when I see a nice ultraportable I have to ask whether it will run a slim, fast, and low-cost Linux, or whether I'll be forced to install Windows. Having killed my last Windows box a couple of years back, having a choice of operating systems (RedHat, Ubuntu, Kubuntu,...:-) is now my number 1 criteria when buying a portable.
I think Linux needs better power management before I can consider it for an ultra portable. Ubuntu Gutsy ran great on my Vaio TZ, except for the fact that my battery life went from 6 hours to 3, even after shutting off the cd drive, lowering lcd brightness, and turning on SpeedStep.
So close, but so far away. Even hackintosh did better with power.
Why would they pre-announce an ultraportable tiny laptop with flash drive and no optical less than 2 weeks from mac world? I bet a little monkey king whispered in their ear that Apple is releasing something like this and they don't want to be a me-too. In any case we'll be seeing lots of these small screen + keyboard + flash laptops coming out soon. If not I'm going to regret not getting an eee already.
Why would they pre-announce an ultraportable tiny laptop with flash drive and no optical less than 2 weeks from mac world?
Probably because CES is less than 2 weeks before mac world, and this is what companies tend to do at CES?
"Man, why would they eat a lot at Thanksgiving less than a month before Christmas? I bet a little monkey whispered in their ear that Christmas was going to have a big ham, and they don't want to be a me-too, so they announced a big turkey a month earlier.":)
Good point. But check out this Apple Patent [uspto.gov].
It looks to me like Apple is coming out with the ultimate: a super-portable laptop that you slide into the side of a monitor and it becomes your main computer with your optical drive, full keyboard, mouse, and hard drive storing your large data (like most of your tunes and videos and stuff). And you access this data wirelessly when you remove it (to read web pages on the couch or whatever). You can probably even slide it into anybody's 'mac display' and get you
I'd rather they give the toy computers a different name. I know they're trying to draw an association with the Cadillac of laptops, but I'm essentially certain that Ideapads are going to be missing all the things that make Thinkpads genuinely good, like titanium frames and godly support. You can look at a Thinkpad and see a serious and well constructed computer; that's not true with other business notebooks and frankly I'd rather not have to explain why an Ideapad is different from a Thinkpad, any more than I want to explain why the POS Inspiron isn't the same thing as a Latitude.
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.
Actually I meant "Vostro" and not "Inspiron" in that last post. They're the same shitty laptops, but Dell markets one for business users and the other for people who don't know any better.
It's a no to the Ideapad from me as well, though - but for a different reason: the 15 inch one has the 1280x800 resolution my 4 year old laptop has - and that is one thing I really want to upgrade with my next purchase. And no, I don't want a 17 inch laptop, thanks very much.
I used to not enjoy the trackpoint at all, and I scoffed at trackpoint users. However I quickly realized the benefit of having, and have since grown to love it on my new Lenovo X61 Tabletpc. To all the haters that I was once a part of, we don't care about your hate, we have our nub to rub.
The specs seem to be a little behind the times (at least for the 15" model). Considering it's being touted as a multimedia notebook, I would at least expect a higher resolution (ie 1440x900) and probably a discrete video option.
We don't need all these dinkier notebooks or "tablet PCs". Because they're expensive and suck a lot of power (therefore are heavy and don't last long between charges). These portable PCs are too big, and mobile phones are too small.
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.
Form factor becomes an issue with what you're talking about. I can do all the stuff with the $500 smartphone (HTC 6800 in my case) I have clipped to my belt, but for anything beyond very simple information retrieval, it's too small to be useful. I have multiple input options including touch on screen and hard keyboard, but they're all a pain in the ass. Were my phone any larger, it would wind up in the same category as my notebook, which is to say, too much of a hassle to carry with me all the time, everywhe
So, now the Chinese are aping the Japanese method and renamed the thinkpad the ideapad?
No, they're simply ridding the Lenovo line of any trace of the old IBM culture and trademarks. Thirty years ago, IBM employees used to go to the nearest office supply cabinet, and pull out these little pocket notepads with a leatherette cover. On the leatherette cover, only the word "THINK" was printed, in gold foil lettering. It became so ingrained in the IBM employee culture that the name ThinkPad was an obvious choice for the laptop when it was released. Lenovo isn't IBM.
"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]
Beaten to it by some projector [slashdot.org] (and maybe that memory foam stuff as well - I didn't read that one, so I'm not sure whether it's about a product).
I always thought that they looked really dorky and clunky. A friend had one he wanted to sell( a T23, back in 2004) for a reasonable price. I was impressed with the solid build they had and the little features (the led on the top of the screen for night sessions was great). It worked well with linux and took a hell of a beating. I finally trashed it this last year. I was a little sketchy on getting another one now that Lenovo had taken over the reigns, but figured I'd give it a shot. I grabbed a lenovo R61i from Compusa @ their going OOB sale for fairly cheap and have been very happy with it. Ubuntu 7.10 booted right up and detected everything perfectly. The only thing I haven't used or tried to get working is the fingerprint scanner.
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.
At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Is "consumer friendly" just a code word for "cheap"?
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It would suck if I couldn't log into my notebook just because I was wearing my leather bondage hood and bridle.
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!"
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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.
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I hope people give the Lenovo brand a chance. They are a nice design change from many of the tired, old designs rolled out over the past 2 ye
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)
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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)
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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....
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If you're sitting in front of Vista... (Score:2)
But if it's Vista... (Score:2)
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Also I don't want to lose the joke of "watching someone though their monitor"...
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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 it against its secret database, and next time it's connected to the internet, files a report with DHS.
Re:face recognition (Score:5, Funny)
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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)
Parent
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They'll also probably abandon the classic "black brick" Thinkpad styling.
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1. Small screens, from people who don't understand why a notebook needs to be portable.
2. Poor multimedia options, from people who expect a notebook to play Doom 3 in 1080p with surroundsound on a notebook.
3. High price, which is a complaint I might see as legitimate (though, I think that the support Lenovo provides more than justifies the added cost).
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(I haven't used later thinkpads, so maybe they do have them, but all the ones I used had the windows keys mysteriously missing)
Re:Consumer friendly?? (Score:5, Funny)
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Bizarre... (Score:2)
consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads
What's so consumer-unfriendly about thinkpads?
Well, judging from the specs of the IdeaPads, evidently high resolution and a trackpoint must be consumer-unfriendly, and low res and touchpad only are consumer friendly....
I think I'll stick with the ThinkPad line, thanks anyway...
I see that historically the non-thinkpad Lenovo's are cheaper, and I guess that's what they mean, but I don't see anything to distinguish them from every other cheaper laptop in existence.
mod parent up... (Score:2)
Thats the common problem with overinflated product announcements, practically any hyperbole they apply will make previous products from the same company look silly.
But does it run Linux? (Score:2)
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So close, but so far away. Even hackintosh did better with power.
Implications on mac world (Score:2)
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Why would they pre-announce an ultraportable tiny laptop with flash drive and no optical less than 2 weeks from mac world?
Probably because CES is less than 2 weeks before mac world, and this is what companies tend to do at CES?
:)
"Man, why would they eat a lot at Thanksgiving less than a month before Christmas? I bet a little monkey whispered in their ear that Christmas was going to have a big ham, and they don't want to be a me-too, so they announced a big turkey a month earlier."
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It looks to me like Apple is coming out with the ultimate: a super-portable laptop that you slide into the side of a monitor and it becomes your main computer with your optical drive, full keyboard, mouse, and hard drive storing your large data (like most of your tunes and videos and stuff). And you access this data wirelessly when you remove it (to read web pages on the couch or whatever). You can probably even slide it into anybody's 'mac display' and get you
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http://techreport.com/discussions.x/12623 [techreport.com]
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.
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No Trackpoint. (Score:5, Insightful)
No trackpoint = no sale.
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It's a no to the Ideapad from me as well, though - but for a different reason: the 15 inch one has the 1280x800 resolution my 4 year old laptop has - and that is one thing I really want to upgrade with my next purchase. And no, I don't want a 17 inch laptop, thanks very much.
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Next Up: FreedomPad (Score:5, Funny)
Specs (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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Were my phone any larger, it would wind up in the same category as my notebook, which is to say, too much of a hassle to carry with me all the time, everywhe
Surround sound?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Does the ThinkPad line come with fewer gimmicks?
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:
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So, now the Chinese are aping the Japanese method and renamed the thinkpad the ideapad?
No, they're simply ridding the Lenovo line of any trace of the old IBM culture and trademarks. Thirty years ago, IBM employees used to go to the nearest office supply cabinet, and pull out these little pocket notepads with a leatherette cover. On the leatherette cover, only the word "THINK" was printed, in gold foil lettering. It became so ingrained in the IBM employee culture that the name ThinkPad was an obvious choice for the laptop when it was released. Lenovo isn't IBM.
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.
Parent
Nope (Score:2)
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.
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