Lenovo:

The “Behind-the-Scenes Business” of a Business-Grade Tablet

2011-08-23T14:22:46+00:00

Matthew Kohut is a Services Launch and Sales Enablement consultant at Lenovo. A former hardware guy, he has seen the light on how services can make PCs and tablets even more valuable to business customers. We're really excited about our ThinkPad Tablet, and today they started shipping. We know that we have great hardware, but our tablet announcement is much more than hardware. I argue that we have the industry’s first business-class tablet because we are the only vendor who can provide a full suite of services to make our customers more productive and secure. First, a business grade tablet needs a business grade warranty. Our ThinkPad Tablet comes with a one year warranty and can be upgraded to three years in length, which differentiates Lenovo from other tablet makers who offer out of the box warranties that last as few as 90 days and extend to only two years. Furthermore, we can equip models with ThinkPad Protection which protects against many common accidents. The market leading tablets don’t offer this accidental damage protection, even at an extra cost. Out of the box, any tablet is a consumer device because it is free and open. This is by design and is one of the great things about using a tablet. However, businesses need more control to make sure that tablets on their networks will not compromise security. This takes some customization (read: valuable time and money – Android experts are...

SATA 3.0 600MB/s on ThinkPad Notebooks

2011-04-21T15:38:19+00:00

I know there has been confusion on the Lenovo Forums lately about whether our latest generation of ThinkPad notebooks supports SATA 600 MB/s speed. The short answer is yes. Those who only want the short answer can stop reading here. We at Lenovo have not always taken advantage of the latest technology afforded by the chipset used inside our products. For example, we took some flak because our ThinkPad T61 capped its SATA bus speed @ 150 MB/s. The 965 generation of chipset actually supported faster 300 MB/s transfer rates. In our defense, no hard disk at the time came close to saturating a SATA 150 bus; no SSDs really did either. But I understand the psychology of having a brand new hot rod sports car artificially limited to 120 MPH by a governor chip, even if you’d never drive it that fast anyway. I know there is a lot of confusion on this topic, so I started asking our engineers questions about our latest systems. I learned that if you buy a new ThinkPad system featuring Intel’s Huron River chipset, you’ll get a primary hard disk bus that runs at SATA 600 speeds. The reason many benchmarks are not showing this bus speed increase is because the drives we are currently shipping are only SATA 300 capable. We’ll add SATA 600 drive choices at a future date. Your Ultrabay will also run at SATA 600 speeds if you choose to...

TrackPoint P.S.—Thanks, and fear not!

2011-03-03T23:00:01+00:00

Well, yesterday's post on the TrackPoint certainly seemed to strike a nerve with some people. And 81 comments later, I am sitting here in amazement at the sheer level of loyalty and devotion my readers have for the DNA of the ThinkPad brand. Let's get one thing out of the way: I never once discussed removing the TrackPoint from any ThinkPad--I was merely sharing a personal story. And there's no subtext, no foreshadowing and no plan to do away with it. My intent was to drive discussion on the way we use ThinkPad notebooks and what that means to me personally. Finally, a huge thanks for all the comments. I'm flattered that so many people wrote in and that many of you spent time yesterday examining the value of the little red nub we take for granted most days. Our management team cares about your feedback and they do read the comments on our blogs--rest assured that when you take the time to write back here, you aren't spitting into the wind. In other words, keep 'em comin'.

Time to give up TrackPoint?

2011-03-02T15:17:34+00:00

I haven’t forgotten my promise to write about 5th generation Owl Blade technology. This topic is weighing on me this morning, so I'm going to go with it. I’m wondering if it is time for me to give up using a TrackPoint in favor of (gasp!) a touch pad. Five years ago I would never have made such a heretical statement, but maybe it is time. One, I’m worried about carpal tunnel syndrome. I don’t suffer from it, but I wonder if I’m headed down that road. As of late I’ve noticed that sometimes at the end of a long day, I can feel one of my right arm’s tendons – not hurting mind you – but feel it. I’ve taken extra steps to make sure I use good typing habits (not letting my wrists sag and all that), but in narrowing down the cause, I’ve noticed that it takes a LOT of force to move a TrackPoint. It’s the tendon for my right index finger that I have been noticing at the end of a long day. For the uninitiated, there are two ways you can affect how your TrackPoint operates. First, in mouse properties in Windows, you can adjust the pointer speed. This is a global Windows setting that controls acceleration for any pointing device. The second...

ThinkPad T420s

2011-02-23T05:40:37+00:00

I have been alternately looking forward and dreading today’s announcements. Even though I confirmed some specs about the ThinkPad T420s in this thread during the CES timeframe, I knew there would be considerable backlash about our final move to 16:9 displays. I know many are unhappy, and over the years, we’ve been through this here. I skipped the T410s, but I can’t wait for my T420s coming in a few weeks. Look at some of the cool improvements that I like: Better battery life. Your bay batteries from the T400s/T410s still work. The Intel processor with onboard graphics has more performance and better battery life than before. Slightly lighter. We are about .2 lbs. /.1 kg lighter, mostly from the move to a new display panel. New VoIP enhancements. The camera has much better low light sensitivity with backlit sensor technology. Instead of muting the microphone when you type, we actually filter out the keyboard noise. Dolby Certified Sound. ThinkPad speakers have always underwhelmed me. This will set a new standard for quality sound. UEFI. We have two modes in “BIOS.” Legacy and fast boot. Choose fast boot unless you are in a corporate environment and you’ll see much faster startup/shutdown. Sadly, for the dull corporate world, we’ve dumbed down UEFI with a legacy BIOS overlay. New Preload....

Your Next PC Will Be Designed by a Computer

2010-12-23T03:34:18+00:00

We may be able to slow it down, but we can never contain, control or comprehend it. It’s the machines’ market now; we just trade in it. -- Wired Magazine – Bull vs. Bear vs. Bot, Jan 2011 The above quote comes from January’s dead tree version of Wired Magazine in a multi-page featurette on the state of artificial intelligence. While AI isn’t quite what the futurists of the 1960s imagined, we are completely dependent on it forevermore. Using a comprehensive suite of sensors and algorithms, machines are using the scientific method to test the world around them and learning from their mistakes. These same principles can be used to make the perfect PC portfolio in time for Lenovo to debut at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show. A lot of the foundation we need is already in place. Intel heavily relies on computers to design its next generation of processors. If PCs can design complex CPUs, something as “simple” as a notebook computer can’t be that out of reach. All it takes is data. Lenovo sells a large number of notebook PCs, many of which have overlapping features and specs. We get massive amounts of sales telemetry data from lenovo.com, our business partners, and our retail storefronts. In addition, Lenovo gets lots of industry-specific data from amalgamators like International Data Corporation (IDC) which can slice and dice any number of ways...

Predictions For 2011

2010-12-09T15:42:12+00:00

Now is the time of year when many people write predictions for 2011. Here are mine: USB 3.0– This is the year that USB 3.0 appears on many notebooks. End users will shop for it, but no one will actually have anything useful to connect to the standard. This will be a technology that is rather staid, but very useful. It allows faster HDD storage, but no one has come up with the killer app for it. Light Peak– To steal one of my favorite lines of the year “Are you there God? It’s me, Marketing.” Intel has been rather quiet on this technology for a while. Slates– This is an easy one to make because everyone is making the same prediction. Supposedly there are 70 slates being announced at CES in January. Most of them will be commercial failures with disappointing sales and widespread malaise and apathy from consumers. Seventy is way too many, but this is a natural course evolution for any new product. The bell curve for technology has shrunk. We’ve moved from the pioneer stage to the early portion of mass adoption. Look for some very cool products this year. This is THE category to watch. Android– Hugely popular for the masses. People will ask for it by name, though they won’t quite understand what “it” is. Vendors capitalize on this mass...

Windows 7 – One Year Later

2010-10-06T21:56:01+00:00

It has been a while since I have posted. I’m sorry. I was cleaning up some old files yesterday and came across a lot of folders with last modified dates of August 19. I realized that August 19 was the day I switched over to Windows 7. One year later, I still love the operating system, but it is either time for a service pack or for me to reinstall or start fresh. I think both are needed. It is not that Windows 7 isn’t running okay, but I have a bunch of little nits that have crept into my day to day usage. This system isn’t suffering from Windows rot in the classical sense, but it is not daisy-fresh any longer either. Boot and reboot times have slowed somewhat. Granted, I have added a screen calibration utility to my boot up sequence and Sun and Adobe are completely out of control with their respective resource-hogging, intrusive updating apps, so this problem is not entirely Microsoft’s. Net, this system isn’t quite as spry on reboot. Windows 7 Libraries sorely need a service pack update. I like the idea in theory, but the execution is flawed. I need to rebuild my index about every month or so because my latest files don’t show up in my listing. Windows constantly wants to refresh my view whenever I open My Pictures, making me wait. Most...

UEFI “BIOS”

2010-07-07T21:03:56+00:00

When Windows 7 launched last Autumn, our Performance Engineer, John Mese was kind enough to come on camera with me and discuss Lenovo’s Enhanced Experience, our high performance Windows 7 preload. We talked briefly about UEFI, and John mentioned that it offered significant advantages for future PCs. Speed is one of these advantages. In the 3 minute (or so) video below, I interview John and he demos a ThinkPad T400 with its BIOS replaced with UEFI. Otherwise, the system is a stock T400 with a plain vanilla Windows 7 load from the Microsoft install DVD. It cold boots to a fully functioning Windows desktop in about 11 seconds or so. In my mind that is nothing short of extraordinary. But we could probably do better: The T400 has since been replaced with the T410. The T410’s faster hardware would probably shave another 1 second off boot. As I mentioned, the install is a stock Windows 7 load. If we added our Lenovo Windows 7 optimized enhancements, we could expect to shave 1 – 2 additional seconds off boot. You’ll notice that the system is running the Windows Basic color scheme. Aero would add approximately 0.5 seconds to boot. We would have done so, but for the drivers available on the install DVD. The HDD activity light is not completely solid, so that suggests that optimizing code, load order, and even the HDD choice might save us another 0.5 seconds. While we won’t be leaking Windows 8...

Storm Chasing Update

2010-06-04T15:39:58+00:00

I blogged last year about my experiences with the CSWR (Center for Severe Weather Research) “storm chasing” team and our ThinkPad T400s. When I rode along with them, I abused a T400s notebook in the rain, dropped it, and then finally crushed it with a 10,000 lb. truck. It was a lot of fun, but not a lot of practical value to the CSWR team, other than to give them confidence that the hardware we provided to them was tough. Based on our conversations with the team, we thought that a brand new Lenovo product, the ThinkCentre M90z would be an ideal fit to aid their data analysis. If you watch the brief video below, you’ll get a glimpse of the ThinkCentre M90z which we will announce next week. Dr. Wurman talks about how the CSWR team is using the M90z in their research in a phone interview narration. Notice the large display and how the team is using the built in touch screen technology to help zoom into relevant parts of their RADAR images. Since the machine is part of our M90 Series desktop family, you definitely can expect the same level of technology, reliability, and manageability that we’re known for, just in a more compact, integrated, and integrated package. The team is most excited that the year’s tornado season is much better than last year. They were frustrated that their team only...