Editorials

Happy 1,000th blog post and a big THANK YOU

by ThinkPads on February 7, 2011

While publishing up a blog earlier today, I noticed an interesting number in the admin interface.

That’s right, you’re reading post 1,000 from the crew at LogicThinkPad. Our first post was published on February 11th, 2009, just shy of 2 years ago!

We hope you’ve enjoyed the news, deals, and reviews we’ve brought you over the past couple years.

As a thank you to our readers, we’d like to have a fun little contest. Is there a blog post that stood out as one of your favorites? A review of your favorite Lenovo product? Whichever of our posts over the past 2 years has tickled your fancy, post a link to it in the comments!

Of those who post a comment and link to their favorite post (you could even include a little commentary too!), I will select 5 people at random. 2 of those will receive a unique Lenovo & Star Trek 15.4-inch laptop skin. These were created by Lenovo around the launch of the latest Star Trek film and were not sold to the general public! Check out a picture of the skin (removable graphic that goes on the back of your display) after the jump.

The other 3 people will receive a 2GB LogicBuy flash drive. Of course be sure to use a valid e-mail address when you comment and we’ll publish the winners later this week!

Thanks for being here for a thousand posts and helping make this blog such a great resource for everything Lenovo!

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Dell really likes ThinkPads

by ThinkPads on September 6, 2010

Dell likes ThinkPads so much, they even use them to promote spillproof keyboards! Photo taken at the Comex conference in Singapore.

While this was likely just a sparky little go-getter from a PR agency who needed an image for a piece of signage and hit up Google with no knowledge of laptop makes & models, it’s still good for a few chuckles.

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Editorial: Commoditization of ThinkPad

by ThinkPads on June 2, 2010

ThinkPad is indeed becoming a commodity like so many other laptop lines. I fight back my urge to rebuke those who claim “We pay more for a ThinkPad and we should get more” – the reality is that you don’t pay more, not these days. For the U.S., this can be at least partially blamed on aggressive eCommerce discounts and sales to sustain business in slow times.

Constant discounts condition customers to wait for the next deal and the increasingly lower price. This is understandable when business is slow and you have to keep moving units; especially when your bread & butter corporate clients clam up because IT spending budgets disintegrate. That still creates a bit of a problem if you attempt to raise prices on existing models once spending picks up again: some may perceive “regular” prices or less discounts as paying “too much” for XYZ model, because it was 15% cheaper a few months prior.

But Lenovo gets an easy out for all the long term effects of constant “sale” prices: new models. With new models launched at the beginning of a new year, with new tech inside them and longer lead times as supply and production ramp up, they practically have a get-out-of-jail-free card to set reasonable MSRP’s and stop the constant sales. But as we’ve seen over the past 6 months, that didn’t last long. We’re still seeing aggressive sales on a monthly basis for all but the most constrained models (ala X201 Tablet).

Commoditization, sadly, is also just part of the “times.”

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Resistance is Futile, or TrackPoint FTW

by ThinkPads on May 28, 2010

I did it, and I wasn’t even trying. My fiancée likes the TrackPoint.

Let me back up. She has an older Dell Inspiron laptop, which serves her purposes just fine. Now, she treats her laptop a bit like she treats her car. After years of usage, the battery is 100% toast and her AC adapter plug bit the dust as well, meaning she couldn’t even use it attached to the wall.

Between review units and my own ThinkPad collection, there was no shortage of laptops for her to use. It took me a couple weeks to get around to ordering a new AC adapter AND battery (let’s face it, a laptop is only so convenient when you’re strapped to a wall). In that time, she was generally using a ThinkPad.

Fast forward to a couple days ago. The new genuine battery and genuine AC adapter arrive (thank you eBay) and I quietly swapped her hard drive so I could put a fresh coat of Win7 on her pink Dell. Years of software build-up had left Vista feeling like a Yugo.

With everything squared away and Win7 flying along with the Pentium dual-core & 2GB RAM, what were the first words out of her mouth upon receiving her much refurbished machine?

Wow….I miss the little thing on the keyboard.

Or something to that effect. Yes, she got used to and now prefers a TrackPoint. She still likes her Dell keyboard better, but to her credit it’s not a bad keyboard. The Fn key is just in the wrong place. :P

I win!

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I know this isn’t the usual Lenovo-fodder, but this article from Gizmodo caught my eye. Best Buy opened its first UK store last Friday, which ended up with the company’s best-ever opening weekend sales record.

Perhaps most interesting to me about this is the author’s commentary on the state of tech shopping in the UK. I know we have a lot of UK readers and accordingly, ThinkPad has a lot of UK users/fans. It seems that UK tech shops are dominated by a couple major brands and the quality of service is rather lacking.

To tie this in with ThinkPads, it was my understanding that a lot of ThinkPads sold in the UK are through Lenovo’s channel partners, aka resellers. I believe at least some of these partners are smaller businesses, but I don’t have a picture of the overall breakout.

Also, not long ago Lenovo added configure-to-order capability to their UK website, which one would hope is a more cost effective route of purchase.

Chime in

So, dear UK readers, please chime in on how you shop for ThinkPads. I’m interested to hear where you buy from and how this has changed over the years, as I imagine at least a few of you have been long-time ThinkPad users.

Are the resellers offering ThinkPads primarily smaller businesses, or are they in the chains too? Where do you find the best prices? How does Lenovo’s UK site compete in price?

Also, for those who have visited the new Best Buy location, are there any Lenovo PCs on display?

Cheers!

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Ultrabay Design Poll Results

by ThinkPads on May 3, 2010

A few weeks back I posted a discussion on the new Ultrabay design featured in Lenovo’s ThinkPad T400s and newer models. One T410 user felt strongly enough that the design change wasn’t a flaw that he made a video showing how easy it was to remove a drive with the new design.

I posted the pro’s and con’s of the old and new designs, with his video and my own pictures of the old design, and opened the post for discussion of the differing designs. I also posted a poll, the results of which you can see above, and we got some good input.

Nearly half of everyone who voted in the poll didn’t care about the change, and funnily enough this likely reflects the real world ThinkPad user base. Most people who come by a ThinkPad at work, through school or other passive means probably don’t even know about the Ultrabay, much less how to swap it.

The remaining respondents were nearly tied for the two more moderate poll responses, which in retrospect were a bit close to each other in meaning. In the end, 48% of you felt it wasn’t the end of the world, even if it was a bit dumb.

Finally, only a scant 8 people are in love with their Ultrabay enough to declare the new design a deal breaker. The biggest turning point in the situation comes down to swapping while docked, so if we had known that fact perhaps the split would have been larger.

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Way back in March when I published my review of Lenovo’s refreshed ThinkPad T410, I doted on its Swiss-Army-Knife-esque features & capabilities, while dumping on some backward steps taken with usability. One of these backward steps is the release mechanism for the Ultrabay.

The previous Ultrabay design had a small switch that you would slide, ejecting a pull tab that allowed you to quickly and easily yank the drive. See the extensive photoshoot from my Droid below for an illustration.

The new design functions similarly, but places both of the buttons/switches/whatever-you-want-to-call-it on the bottom of the system. Reader Navck created the video below demonstrating what he sees as a non-issue with the new design.

Big thanks to Navck for making this video! We all know Lenovo had their reasons for modifying the Ultrabay eject mechanism, but I still feel that it was a step backwards in usability. It is certainly not a deal breaker, and I didn’t even heavily stress it in my T410 review. I did stress it in my T410 Upgrading article, as the focus was on swapping components in the T410 and this was certainly a regression from the T400 and prior models.

Reader Doug points out the remaining major concern with this new design: can you reach this latch release if the system is docked? That is a great question, but unfortunately I have neither a T410 or one of the new docks. I can put in a question to Lenovo, but I would love to see our community chime in and maybe have some photos or videos to share. Does anyone have a T400s, T410, T510 or W510 and a dock?

What do you think?

So, dear reader, what is your take on this? Is it a big deal to you? If the new design prevents swapping while docked, is that a deal breaker for you? Vote in the poll below and hit the comments

What do you think of the new Ultrabay swapping mechanism?

View Results

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Right now Lenovo’s product line is very convoluted, across the board. The ThinkPad T, X and W Series all fit in and make sense. Then we have the SL, originally purported to be SMB focused. One might guess that its traditional design wasn’t quite “mainstream” enough for SMB, or at least Lenovo’s perception of SMB.

Enter: ThinkPad Edge. Slim, sleek, multiple colors, but still sporting some ThinkPad heritage. With its 100% SMB focus, where does this leave the SL models? Furthermore, we also have the ThinkPad R Series quickly gathering dust as it didn’t get refreshed in January with everyone else. We’ve suspected for a while that R Series would be going away, and with rumors of the L Series popping up a couple months ago, it would make sense for L to replace R.

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Left: Dell Precision M4500 | Right: Lenovo ThinkPad W510 (not to scale)

It’s okay Dell, we’ll pretend you have an original design. Although I guess to be fair, the top cover certainly is…original.

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I’m at a bit of a loss here with the ThinkPad Edge. We get it, small business computing. But what is there to small business that an IdeaPad or a ThinkPad can’t provide?

Why does there need to be a ThinkPad Edge? And for that matter, where does ThinkPad SL fall now? That WAS touted to be the small business ThinkPad, but seems like it’s more being slotted in as a de-featured R Series replacement with the recent refresh.

The way I see it, SMB needs don’t necessarily come down to technology, but to services and price points. I’ve heard the arguments that SMB wants/needs more consumer oriented features that just aren’t appropriate on ThinkPad. Going by that logic, the biggest feature differences are the AMD processors (which bring in a lower price point with a bit more performance than Intel’s CULV) and HDMI output. The color choices help broaden appeal, but that’s it.

From the services perspective, ThinkPad’s traditional global level of service with fast turnaround is ideal, if even a bit overkill. The support provided with consumer level machines really isn’t suitable for “mission critical” PCs, like those in a small business, as quality of service is closely managed down to the penny and there are too many places for the ball to drop. ThinkPad-level service isn’t perfect, but it is far more consistent than consumer-level service.

Let’s say Lenovo compromised some things, added a few others to appeal more to SMBs and in the end “lowered” the price: $549 before discounts and with a standard warranty. Right now you can get a ThinkPad T400 for $636 with standard warranty. While this is arguably an exceptional price, it’s not all that different from the Edge starting price and will offer a fair amount more functionality with its Core 2 Duo processor and robust, time proven design. On the other hand, it is bigger and more than a pound heavier, with no color choices or HDMI.

Maybe that’s enough of a reason for Lenovo to start a whole new product line, or maybe their channel partners have been screaming for this for a long time. It would be fair to expect this not to be a big seller on the website or through existing sales relationships in big corporations.

Either way, it’s stretching the brand capital they have left. They tried SMB laptops under the Lenovo name before and it failed miserably, but was that because of the name or the product? Time will tell on this one, but I can’t help but feel things are getting a bit crowded with a unique laptop model for every form factor and price point, crossing both consumer and business laptop lines.

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