ThinkPad Tablet
It’s dessert time for Lenovo’s ThinkPad Tablet. The Android 4.0 operating system—commonly known by its more delicious codename of Ice Cream Sandwich—will be available on our ThinkPad Tablet in May. It will be delivered as an over-the-air update There’s been a lot of fuss about Ice Cream Sandwich in the marketplace, and for good reason. Here are three things we love about it, things you’ll be able to take advantage of on your ThinkPad Tablet when the update comes: A new and improved browser with a significant speed boost that allows you to jump to your favorite content faster and even save it for later in case there's no network available. Voice input that allows you to dictate text. As the voice input engine enters text, it underlines possible dictation errors in gray. After dictating, you tap underlined words to quickly replace them from a list of suggestions. Face Unlock, a new screen-lock option that lets you unlock your device with your face. (Love that.) It takes advantage of the devices’ front-facing camera and state-of-the-art facial recognition technology to register a face during setup and then recognize it again when it’s time to unlock. While this announcement strictly refers to the ThinkPad Tablet, it’s worth noting that we are committed to making other Lenovo tablets “future-proof” by supporting newer releases of the Android OS. We are always assessing and...
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Intel SSD
Ann Mahdy is a Communicatons and Public Relations Manager for Lenovo A few years ago, Solid State Drives started appearing in laptops. Costs were high and capacity was low, and most of the industry stuck with good old-fashioned Hard Disk Drives. Now that it’s 2012, it’s time to rethink the drives you and your customers are using. After all, HDD has been around for a long time (since 1956) so it is not surprising that there is a new drive on the block. So what is the difference between the two drives? To assist in sorting this out we posed a number of questions to Annabelle Thuan, Lenovo SMB Marketing Manager. AM: What is the difference between SSD and HDD? AT: The main difference in the technology is that solid state is a flash-based storage and has no moving parts, while hard disk drives are electromechanical and have a moving component called a spinning platter. As you might expect, with no moving pieces, SDD is more reliable and durable because it can better absorb shock from laptops’ bumps and drops. The other big difference is speed. SSD is much faster because it is NAND memory. This means that data can be located instantaneously by address. HDD, on the other hand, has a two-step process to access the information. The first is that it needs to “seek” the right track on the disk, and the second is that it needs to spin to the right part of the track. This causes a slight delay compared to solid states. Side by Side...
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Lenovo Opens Up The Cloud
Cloud computing, if you forgive the pun, is a rather nebulous concept; difficult to explain to the uninitiated, but in reality, disarmingly simple. What is unquestionably true though is that there is not the same excitement about it among consumers as there is in the technology industry itself. Thus the media reception for Lenovo Cloud at the recent CES in Las Vegas was muted, perhaps due to some understandable cloud fatigue on the part of technology reporters more inclined to write about the latest whiz bang hardware like the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga. The apparent uniformity of cloud offerings, which are mostly focused on storage, delivering content and sharing within a private or hybrid network, is also a factor explaining the relative indifference. The truth is, as some journalists grasped, Lenovo Cloud, already launched in China, is a more ambitious platform than the market has seen so far. Firstly, access to the Lenovo Cloud is open to internet capable devices running any major operating system. This may on the face of it seem too good to be true, but given the Cloud is in essence web based, the closed solution alternative seems shortsighted. In particular Lenovo Cloud is designed with the social aspect of the relationship between families, friends and co-workers in mind, making the same cloud infrastructure relevant to both consumer and business use. A Cloud solution that depends on download of proprietary software...
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CES 2012 Lenovo Lounge
Ah, CES. The crowds, the aching feet, the complete and utter lack of any moisture in the air. But the lovely, lovely gadgets and toys make up for all of that. I'm not sure what constitutes being a CES veteran but this is my 4th one so, if I'm not a veteran, at least I'm not feeling like a noob any more. As you would expect, I spent most of my time in and around the various Lenovo facilities talking about our new products. Many of them have already been covered in depth, but I'll add some personal commentary distilled out of my interactions with our customers, business partners and the press about one of my favorites. And by that, I mean that while I obviously know the SPECS of our systems and may have even physically seen them once or twice before CES, over the course of talking to folks about something for 5 days, it really gives me a chance to live with the machine for a while and really figure out how I feel about it and whether it's something that speaks to me personally. Now onto the A720, our new IdeaCentre all-in-one PC. If you haven't seen it or heard about it, have a look here. While I certainly do get the utility/usage model/attractiveness of All-in-One desktops, they are not anything that's ever been at the top of my personal purchase list, mostly because I've always considered myself a laptop (or fully-expandable desktop) kind of guy. Even if they did tilt a bit , touchscreens on traditional...
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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...
