Enhanced Experience 2012
Where is the Enhanced Experience at CES this year? Rest assured we have some great technology we are working on for our 2012 systems. But in the interim, I’d like to highlight one particular co-engineering effort that’s timely and a great example of what the Enhanced Experience is all about. One of the best parts of my job at Lenovo is collaboration with partners who share a dedication to providing the absolute best customer experience possible. Take AuthenTec, for example, the company that makes the fingerprint sensor solution that ships on many Lenovo ThinkPad laptop PCs. They understand one of the tenets of the Enhanced Experience development philosophy – never be satisfied, always strive for improvement. With the advent of their new TCS5D smart sensor with the TCD51 biometric companion processor we looked together at ways to further improve the performance of the Power-On Authentication feature which allows users to quickly boot or resume their system from standby with the swipe of a finger. Power On Authentication eliminates the typical delay and interruption of the laptop’s pause and the need for the user to enter a Windows password, enhancing the customer experience while also providing the protection of biometric security. Any small improvement we could identify would translate directly to faster time-to-productivity for the end user. Here is a side-by-side video of the...
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Today we’re sitting down with Sam Morris, Lenovo’s education expert, and Jarrett York, North American product manager for the new ThinkPad X130e, to talk about the laptop and how its design has been heavily influenced by Lenovo’s broad experience in education. Lenovo Files: Can you describe the motivators in focusing so much energy and resources on developing this new product? Sam: As more and more schools are deploying PCs to students, it’s clear the day-to-day activities for students are vastly different than those of the mobile workforce. This has led to many situations where the wear and tear on the laptops has resulted in an overload of repairs and replacements, and as a result decreased learning outcomes and operational efficiencies. LF: How did you assess the impact of the wear and tear? Sam: In addition to industry metrics about repair rates, we also examined our internal data for service and warranty claims. We found that laptops in education were four times more likely to need service than the laptops deployed with our military. In addition, through our advisory councils and our annual ThinkTank conference, we surveyed our education customers about the importance of “ruggedness.” The responses indicated that this was universally critical. LF: Can you elaborate more on the work you did to ensure that the X130e met the needs of education? Jarrett: We’ve analyzed the...
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Guest blogger and PC modification (modding) extraordinaire, Dean Liou, takes us through his journey to create his coolest arcade dock mod to date. Let’s start at the beginning of my journey to create the X1 Arcade Dock mod, on June 14th, one month into the project. I filmed the final result on October 9th, nearly six months after I first put my pencil on the drawing board. Fear not, good readers, as it wasn’t six whole months of non-stop sleepless modding -- it was closer to just 10 weekends of blood, sweat and tears*. Hey, I gotta work during the week, ya know? And together with my wife, we have two kids to worry about (*tears were mostly theirs). This is my second arcade dock project, which is essentially an encore to the first arcade dock I created last year – a 15" widescreen IdeaPad Y560 built as an homage to Street-Fighter. It featured a joystick and eight buttons based on a standard bar-top arcade kit purchased online and modified to fit the dock. This second project was much more ambitious as I wanted to create everything from scratch in terms of the cabinet and physical structure. My formula and objectives were as follows: 1. Cut out the middleman arcade kit purchase (why buy and end up modding it anyway?) 2. Design my OWN arcade kit instead, with all the fittings to be a laptop dock 3. Make it awesome and...
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Eight Threats to Tablet Security
Rich Cheston has deep roots in the PC business and has even earned the status of Master Inventor at Lenovo. In this post, he shares his expertise on locking down data in the latest mobile device--the tablet. I recently participated in one of Lenovo’s customer advisory council sessions. Before I attended, I read surveys on the use of tablets, as I anticipated on the hot topics at the session would be the impact of tablets on the consumerization of IT, and the challenges our customers face in securing the devices. What struck me about the survey was that the “why” behind the purchasing decision is so obvious: simple and quick Internet access, ease of browsing and shopping, simple apps, etc. However, there was no mention of the security enablement that should be required to use the tablet in a work environment. This observation matched up well with what I found at the advisory council session. Most IT organizations are little more prepared to face security challenges now than they were a year ago, and the conversations focused on the struggle to ensure security within the corporation of new devices like tablets. Ultimately, our customers have asked us to deliver a tablet that is as secure as a PC. It is this customer need, along with these conversations and observations, which led us to do a detailed...
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ThinkPad Tablet
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...
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