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.
Re:Is there really a market for tablet-laptop (Score:5, Insightful)
Having one device tends to be more convenient and often cheaper.
Not in this case - $1800 is more than a 11" macbook air + iPad (and those are the more expensive options for laptop+tablet).
Lenovo - For Those Who Don't (Score:3, Insightful)
Yawn, give me back my ThinkTank, I don't want your yuppie hipster tablet shit. By all means, go ahead and make it, but not at the sacrifice of the once-venerable ThinkPad, now hamstrung by cheap build quality and shitty, unusable keyboards.
Lenovo, cut the crap (Score:2, Insightful)
Lenovo, just bring us X61 back, will ya ?
This new keyboard is awfull, good old IBM styled keyboards are not available even as an option. (jeesh, this could be a revenue source on it's own)
This 16:9 screen since x200 is absolutely pointless to me - no 3:4 options ?
All these blumps with Thinkpad series over the last decade just shows us, how genius IBM engineering was, and how long does it actually take to kill a really marvelous piece of engineering.
Once, Thinkpad was an alias for solid, bullet-proof work horse. I'm not sure what does it stand for nowdays...