X130e for Education
It’s 2:00 pm on a Wednesday afternoon. The teacher is showing a movie to the class to finish up the lesson. The lights are dim and some of the kids have their heads laid across the corner of their desks, nearly dozing off. There is nothing but dead silence in the classroom as the movie plays on….when suddenly a big loud THUMP startles everyone….the little boy in the middle of the third row dropped his computer on the floor. In the past, a situation like the one we just described may have resulted in a broken computer, cracked screen or potentially corrupted hard drives making repairs necessary, which means additional costs for the school. More importantly however, it means that the boy in the middle of the third row either is forced to share someone else’s computer or get behind in class while he waits for his computer to be fixed. A computer on the desk of the little boy in the middle of the third row is indicative of the move to 1:1 curriculum. The days of watching movies on 27-inch CRT tube TV’s on top of tall squeaky carts and playing “Oregon Trail” on the “community” classroom computer are over. There is a computer on every desk, and schools are beginning to leverage technology - making school days much more exciting and effective.This is the classroom of the 21st Century, not our mother’s classroom, not even our old classroom. With the trend towards a 1:1 eLearning curriculum, the need for...
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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...
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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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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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Luis Hernandez is the vice president, ThinkPad Edge Business Unit, for Lenovo. The annual Mecca of gadgets, computers and more – the International Consumer Electronics Show will commence on Tuesday, January 10, but Ultrabooks and Hybrid computing devices are already at the forefront of tech trend conversations. Twitter is all a-Twitter with predictions and leaked announcements of a number of products in these categories. Kicking off a smorgasbord of major product announcements during CES 2012, we officially released our first business Ultrabook, the ThinkPad T430u and the ThinkPad X1 Hybrid laptop, fulfilling a burning desire by business professionals for sleek, stylish PCs that kick power performance butt. Who says all work can’t include some play – especially when it comes to aesthetics and multimedia capabilities. It’s been said so many times already in the latest headlines of CNN, Forbes, Scientific American and more, 2012 will be the year of the Ultrabook. This new product niche represents what we think of as 'Laptop 2.0' - the laptop computer...
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