Lenovo "Rips and Flips" the ThinkPad With New Convertible Helix Design 143
MojoKid writes "Convertible laptops and ultrabooks had a big presence this year with the release of Windows 8. At CES, Lenovo revealed its ThinkPad Helix which it marketed as having a 'groundbreaking "rip and flip" design' that enables this 11.6-inch ultrabook to transform into a powerful Windows 8 tablet with Intel vPro technology for the enterprise. The ThinkPad Helix lets you work in four different modes: laptop, tablet, stand, and tablet+. When attached to the Enhanced Keyboard Dock in laptop mode, you'll get additional battery life and additional ports as well as Lenovo's ThinkPad Precision keyboard, a five button trackpad that supports Windows 8 features, and a traditional ThinkPad TrackPoint. ... The ThinkPad Helix features an 11.6-inch Full HD 1080p IPS (In-Plane Switching) 10-point multi-touchscreen with pen touch input and Gorilla Glass for protection. Lenovo claims the ThinkPad Helix will run for up to 8 hours on a single charge. Performance-wise, the new ThinkPad tablet convertible doesn't have a ton of horsepower, but the machine will get by well enough handling light multimedia and office app use with relative ease."
The "stand" mode is just the tablet part mounted away from the keyboard, tablet+ similarly just the tablet part folded over the dock giving it a longer battery life and more ports. It comes at a price though: ~$1800.
Lenovo, please unlock the bootloader (Score:5, Informative)
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-slate-tablets/Thinkpad-Tablet-1-Errors-on-Recovery-Menu/td-p/1055573 [lenovo.com]
The devices is prone to brick if the software (recovery menu) gets corrupted. And can not be recovered since Lenovo has the bootloader locked. The solution that Lenovo gives you is to replace the mainboard for a software error.
Lenovo Quality team told me that they can not release the bootloader keys because the Thinkpad Tablet has DRM software included.
$1800 !!!!! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Lenovo, stop destroying the ThinkPad Brand! (Score:5, Informative)
I used to have ThinkPads, given to me by my employers. Now, for my personal use as I no longer have a work-issued laptop, I've ended up getting a Dell Latitude E6400 on Ebay, and I really like it. The keyboard is quite good for a notebook, and just as good as the T-series Thinkpad I used to have. The design is much more attractive, and it even uses real metal for much of the exterior, rather than plastic.
Unfortunately, your last line is correct: the successor to this, the E6410, was just as good (really only a slight update to use the Core i5/i7 CPUs instead of the Core2Duos), but after that they went to the E6420 and E6430, and they're shit. The E6420 changed to a crappy rounded shape, is much uglier, and there's a horrific looking orange trim ring around the keyboard for some insane reason. It looks ridiculous. The E6430 changed the butt-ugly orange ring to gray, but otherwise is pretty much identical, and still butt-ugly. Worse, these switched to the shitty wide-aspect-ratio screens, so you lose vertical pixels with these new "improved" models, as compared to the old ones (no, you don't get more horizontal pixels either); the whole change was really a cost-cutting move along with a move to "update" the aesthetics to make them ugly like everything else in the consumer space has become these days.
So if you want my recommendation, get a E6400 or E6410 (or their 15-inch brothers the E6500/E6510) on Ebay off-lease. They're dirt cheap, and there's tons of cheap parts available from vendors on there. Just be sure to get the higher-res screens, and unless the screen res isn't important to you, don't get anything from the official Dell refurbished seller on there ("delldirect" or something like that), because they never list the screen res. Avoid the newest models, though this seems to go for everything these days.
Re:Lenovo, please unlock the bootloader (Score:4, Informative)
So... 10 weeks later I got a replacement machine!
Lenovo ships every spare part by boat from China. This is a joke for machines such as Thinkpads which are meant for businesses.
It boggles the mind that their Chinese based operations can be so stupid as not to realize the damage they do to their brand every time this happens.
My last thinkpad was needed repairs just a few months after the two year warranty expired, then a year later one day it just died. That was my third thinkpad and the last one I ever buy.
Re:Is there really a market for tablet-laptop (Score:4, Informative)
The reason we're looking at this device at my business: saving on software licensing.
Yes, you can buy at T-series notebook and a tablet for about the same money, but you're buying two licenses of each software title now. Also, this device still checks all the boxes we were using X-series tablets for previously - namely signature capture with a stylus.
Oh, and they have Windows 7 support, so we don't even have to train our users on Windows 8 until Microsoft relents and gives us a sensible UI.