Change in ThinkPad design typically evolves rather than making radical moves. Talk to stewards of the brand, David Hill or Aaron Stewart, and each of them will tell you that any tweaks to this hallmarks’ design come only after hours of excruciating and detailed thought. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who says we change for change’s sake. So when we do, it’s deliberate and for the better. That said, it’s hard to make everyone happy. Any time we make the slightest change, we get reams of comments – some “thank you” and “I love this,” and some, “What are you doing?” and “Don’t mess with it.” We truly appreciate those strong voices because it shows us your passion for technology and ThinkPad. To reach the top, products and companies continually reinvent themselves – just look at eBay or Amazon. We’re doing it too by moving from a PC company to a PC+ technology company with new products like smartphones and smartTVs in many countries across the world. To take it back to ThinkPad, we want to retain the right amount of ThinkPad-ness that satisfies our loyal customers who’ve always valued it while modernizing ThinkPad under the influences of consumerization’s focus on simplicity, interoperability and connectedness. We’ve pinpointed that important balance with the new ThinkPad T431s, a laptop that answers the question, with...
ThinkPad Tablet 2
Following on from our first article, "Developers on the Tablet 2 - Project ", we present more interviews with the developers. In this second article we discuss mechanical engineering and industrial design. The crucial packaging aspect of the project was handled by an engineer with experience in mechanical design for portable game consoles, and a veteran lead designer around since the birth of the ThinkPad who worked on the 560, X30, and X1, as well as the original Tablet. - The Tablet 2 is so thin, light, and stylish. First, can you tell us about the enhancements made to the packaging that came up in the last interview? Hasegawa: Sure. Compared to the original, the Tablet 2 went from... 14.5mm to 9.8mm in thickness, which is almost 5mm or over 30% thinner. It also went from about 759g (with pen) to about 590g (with pen), for weight savings of almost 150g, or 23%. As you can imagine, this kind of evolution is almost unheard of in this industry. Now our only problem is figuring out where to go from here (LOL). The concept for the original Tablet was to create a tablet that maintained ThinkPad quality and also included a digitizer pen, which is extremely difficult from a mechanical engineering standpoint. This concept remained unchanged for the Tablet 2, but by placing emphasis on making a thinner, lighter product, we had to take on a lot of new challenges....
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There’s nothing more frustrating to a propeller head—computer geek to the lay person—than using a slow computer. For those of us who use computers for everything, life comes to a screeching halt while we watch the spinning blue ring. Even though I work for “the fastest growing computer manufacturer in the world” (I couldn’t resist adding in that plug), you would assume that these problems do not apply to me. I wish that were the case. There are about 26 million web pages that tell you how to make your computer faster or perform better. Everybody has an opinion on what makes your system run faster. The top things to do are: Increase your system’s memory Remove those pesky spyware, malware, Trojan horses, viruses, etc. Delete temporary internet files and temporary windows files, empty the trash, free up some disk space Fix your windows registry files Defrag your hard drive Of course this is not a complete list, but it’s a start. For those of you who are computer savvy, performing these tasks are not difficult, just time consuming and they get in the way of your normal computing life style. For those of you who have little to no idea how to do these tasks, rest assured we can help. Lenovo’s Premium Support Services has several ways to help you increase your computer’s performance, starting with our PC Checkup tool...
The New Windows 8 user interface – although seen before its official announcement – created a lot of emotions. The majority of new PCs will have this new interface, pushing us toward a new world of touch. I want to explore a new way to benefit from the many features of Win8 by introducing it's best friend, the Lenovo Wireless Touchpad. The biggest change in Win8 is the Start screen, which is optimized for touch. To accommodate this demand for touch, there are new apps – gestures, bigger buttons, redesigned user interface. Whether you have a touch screen enabled device or not, there is a change in how you navigate too. The challenge is that currently not all notebooks and even less desktops have touchscreen. When all you hear about is touch, but you do not have that capability yet, ask yourself – how do I benefit in this situation? The answer is simple for me – The Lenovo Wireless Touchpad. We introduced the new Lenovo Touchpad to enable you to: - Navigate on your notebook or desktop even without a touch screen on your system - Navigate using touch, comfortably, on a docked notebook on a stand or if your notebook is positioned further from your finger tips to take advantage of an external keyboard. - Utilize new gestures o Mimic Windows 8 touchscreen gestures (like edge swipe) o Zoom, rotate – Remember, I told you that new...
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When indie filmmaker Michael Suan set his sights on creating a silent action movie, ThinkPad laptops came into play – not just as high-tech props but as the engine to slice and dice thousands of hours of raw footage and then the tool to stitch the digital frames into the master art form that Suan had continually imaged and reimaged in his mind. In the following Q&A, we delved into the mechanics of his latest creation and how he transformed the abstract into a 114-minute long piece of film noir. Q. Tell me about the film – what’s it about and why the name AKP: Job 27. A. AKP: Job 27 is one of those things that I've talked about doing since film school. Every time I mentioned the idea people would tell me how crazy I was. The notion of shooting a feature-length film without a single line of spoken dialogue in a modern setting seemed far-fetched to say the least. But having seen Luc Besson's "Le Dernier Combat" and Kim Ki Duk's "Bad Guy" I was certain that, given the right story, the film could be done. You see, unlike traditional silent cinema that contains no sound and uses title cards for dialogue, AKP: Job 27 uses a form I call modern silent which contains sound but no dialogue at all. The film plays the same as any other film with sound, but the characters do not speak on screen - ever. This is a style of filmmaking that I've been exploring throughout my career, and only now have I placed it into a feature-length form....
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