Excitement to come
Naitoh started by stressing the extra mile Lenovo goes to to engineer its enterprise notebooks to the highest level. Citing the recently launched ThinkPad T400s as a prime example, Naitoh detailed some of the improvements that have made the ‘Super-T' thinner, lighter and generally better than its predecessor.
The slide below shows some of those tweaks, and Naitoh listed the "industry best" repair rate, automatic power-on via the fingerprint reader and its new capacitive touchscreen among the features he was proudest of. But to find out what the HEXUS labs thought of the T400s read the full review here.
But the real excitement from Lenovo in the next few months is going to have much more of a consumer focus. Lenovo has correctly concluded that price and style are at least as important to consumers as engineering, so we can expect to see a bunch of launches that tick these boxes at CES next January.
Naitoh and the other assembled Lenovo execs were very tight-lipped about what we can expect, but the fact that Lenovo will be one of the first OEMs to launch what Qualcomm is calling a smartbook - i.e. a mini-notebook using the Snapdragon low-power chip, which will offer smartphone functionality - leads us to believe we can expect a number of small, light and competitively priced notebooks.
Additionally, Lenovo has announced today that it's going to re-acquire Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology Ltd from some private equity investors it flogged it to in 2008. Yang Yuanqing, CEO of Lenovo Group, said: "As Lenovo's global PC business continues to make steady progress, we view mobile Internet as a key growth opportunity moving forward globally."
While Lenovo may restrict its mobile phone activities to China in the short term, this is further evidence of a strong shift in strategy on the part of the PC maker, as it tries to reduce its reliance on a small handful of sectors.
