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Lenovo showing off waterproof keyboard
Although we thought they'd already solved the problem of keyboard spills with that fancy Batmobile-like armor plating, Lenovo is apparently still looking for ways to keep your 'board safe from dangerous beverages, as they're showing off a waterproof model at their Lenovo Innovation Center in China. Not much is known about the high-tech shenanigans going on inside the keyboard to keep the circuitry running (we suspect nanobots), but it's clear from the pics that you can dump over a cup of water onto it with seemingly no negative effects. So far this doesn't appear to be a technology that the company is commercializing, and frankly it seems like an unnecessary addition to your basic cheap-o plastic keyboard, but we sure wish Logitech et al. would step it up and employ this type of protection in their multi-hundred dollar diNovo Cordless Desktops-like products.
DisplayPort's back -- with Dell, HP, and Lenovo
Ruh roh, just when you knew for a fact you were all settled in with the latest generation of video interconnects for your laptops and peripherals, then VESA comes along and gets three of the most influential companies in the PC business, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, to rally behind its new video interface: DisplayPort. Ok, so it's not that new (we wrote about it last year), but it looks like it's finally ready to rumble starting May 8th. We called up VESA to get the skinny on the port, and they were kind enough to hit us up with that graphic and the following deets: it'll not be backward compatible with with DVI / VGA (ouch), it'll have wire-line encryption developed by Philips -- that's not compatible with HDCP (double ouch), but has a very small plug and scales well (eh). So why create DisplayPort when we've all already settled into DVI / HDMI with or without HDCP for plugging in our plasma or LCD TVs or monitors? Well, because VESA wanted the market to have a unified, license-free video interconnect standard that did a few things current systems don't do, like have a standard low power, low pin count, low profile connector for use on portable device internals and external monitors alike, or scale indefinitely to resolutions, color depths, and refresh rates possibly yet unthought of by systems integrators. Ok, fair enough, but where were these guys in 2001, huh? You know how we feel about nascent standards trying to butt in once we've all finally gotten settled on something decent.
Lenovo 3000 J105 small business minitower reviewed
With a street price of under $500 you certainly can't expect to get the company's high-end jet pack and armor-plating features, but according to PC Mag's review, Lenovo still manages to pack some solid performance into their 3000 J105 small business-oriented desktop. The 3000 J105 is most noteworthy, however, for being Lenovo's first non-IBM branded minitower, although business-types will be pleased to learn that it retains a popular feature of the ThinkCentre line, the ThinkVantage help and recovery utility. Keeping in mind that this model is meant for crunching numbers and not fragging enemies, the 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 3200 , 80GB hard drive, and 512MB of RAM serve their purpose well, and there's enough software in the box to get some work done without shelling out too much more cash. Other nice touches include both PCI (but no PCIe) and AGP card slots for super-cheap graphics upgrades, a not-hideous-looking case, and the always-appreciated lack of Chinese spyware. Overall the J105 earns a three-and-a-half star "Good" rating, which is probably due mostly to its value, considering that it's able to throw down decent benchmark results that are within a stone's throw of machines twice the price.
Lenovo's i921 WinMo smartphone
Akihabara News has some, um, news about a new Windows Mobile-powered handset from Lenovo that is, while not the first smartphone from the PC manufacturer that we've seen, certainly the most attractive. The i921 is said to rock WM5 (no confirmation on that, apparently, but we seriously doubt that they'd go the WinMo 2003 route), a two megapixel camera, Bluetooth, QVGA touchscreen, and MiniSD slot, and work on some unknown number of GSM frequencies. Not many other deets are known, such as pricing or availability, but if we don't see WiFi or UMTS in the specs, we keep on shopping, no matter how hot the phone looks.[Via MobileMag]
Lenovo completes purchase of IBM's PC biz
Chinese-based Lenovo formally completed its purchase of IBM's PC division this past weekend, instantly becoming the world's third-largest PC manufacturer after Dell and HP. It's sort of business as usual over there-much of the old IBM management team is now running the show at Lenovo now, and they've already launched a US version of their website highlighting their newly acquired ThinkPad and ThinkCentre PC lines (still with IBM logos on 'em)-but it'll probably be a few more weeks or months until we see the very first models that are wholly a product of the newly merged company.
Why IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo
Obviously Lenovo must have known what they were getting into when they bought IBM's PC business last month, but it's a little more clear now why IBM was so eager to sell in the first place: they were losing money like crazy. According to a recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, IBM managed to lose nearly a billion dollars selling personal computers over the last 3 1/2 years. Not that we didn't think it'd been a rough past few years or anything, and at the end of the day IBM simply wasn't willing (or able, but probably just not willing) to take the steps needed to turn things around. The interesting part about Lenovo buying IBM's PC business that hasn't gotten much attention is that Lenovo, which is based in China, is turning over much of the management of the company to a group of senior IBM execs. Amazingly, the people who run Lenovo had the humility to recognize that they simply did not have the experience to operate on a global level and decided to outsource, as the NY Times puts it, the management of the company to people who do.
