Those wily engineers over at Lenovo’s Yamato Thinking blog are showing the latest issue of a customer magazine Lenovo publishes in Japan, called Lenovoice. Not wanting their English speaking audience to miss out, they translated the first couple pages into English and attached a handy PDF file for your viewing.

This edition talks a lot about the Yamato labs and the testing that goes on their. Apparently the folks at Yamato want to make sure people realize that ThinkPads have been and still are being designed in Japan, to rigorous standards.

Hit the source link below to check out the two page PDF and if you like what you see, leave a comment for the Yamato Thinking folks. I imagine they would continue to offer something like this with enough feedback.

Source: [Yamato Thinking]

Lenovo recently announced three new LCD monitors, all with 1080p resolution and ranging from 21.5 to 23.6 inches. The high end 23.6-inch model is also equipped with a multitouch screen and a design that would fit right in your home theater.

Lenovo L2261 Wide

At the bottom of the excitement scale is the L2261 Wide 21.5-inch LCD. While not much to look at compared to the other ones, the L2261 does have a pretty high resolution for its size: 1920×1080 in a sub-22 inch panel. It will hook up to most notebooks and desktops just fine with VGA and DVI inputs, but a cheap 1080p LCD is just screaming for HDMI. Also notably absent is the ability to rotate the display to a portrait orientation.

Lenovo L2361p Wide

Stepping up to the L2361p Wide will get you 23-inches, a stylish design, HDMI input and a TV-like stand. This is a pretty strong shift in design for Lenovo’s monitors, clearly taking an aim for the consumer LCDs sold by competitors like Hewlett Packard. You also get integrated speakers & mic, 3 USB 2.0 ports and a 0.3MP webcam. To top off the chique design, the standard push buttons for power, monitor settings, etc have been replaced with slick capacitive touch buttons.

Lenovo L2461x Wide with multitouch

The big, bad L2461x Wide gets the largest of the displays at 23.6-inches and is also the only one with multitouch capabilities. You get speakers, mic, USB ports and webcam on the L2461x, but the USB ports now total 4 and the webcam is a respectable 2.0MP. The slick capacitive touch buttons are also here, but you now have certain “Windows shortcuts” featured as well. Brightness takes a step up to 300 nits and the panel is purported to have “120Hz MEMC technology (Motion Estimation,Motion Compensation).”

Pricing & Availability

Unfortunately we don’t have any pricing or availability information on the L2261 or L2361p, but the touchscreen L2461x is listed at two vendors. The price is a not too shabby $549-580, but availability is “special order” or “call only” and you shouldn’t get your hopes of receiving one any time soon from them. There is also a listing on Lenovo’s Netherlands website with a €835 price tag, which converts to about $1145 USD.

Don’t forget the Green

As with most of Lenovo’s products these days, these new monitors are all Energy Star 5.0, WEEE and RoHS certified. This means they will be power efficient, easily recyclable and do not contain harmful substances like mercury or PBBs. You can also expect the packaging to be minimally wasteful and mostly recyclable. Hopefully they will include the nifty monitor packaging/bag announced last October.

Hit the jump to get the full tech specs on each of these monitors (in the image gallery)

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Lenovo ThinkPad X300 compared to W700, to scale

Lenovo’s head honcho of design and Design Matters blogger David Hill was recently interviewed by a UI & design firm out of Australia. In the interview/podcast, Hill discusses a wide variety of topics around design and ThinkPads. I thought I’d heard it all when it came to ThinkPad design, but this is a very thorough interview and I came out knowing a few more things.

I’ve included my favorite Q&A below, but I highly recommend you read or listen to the whole thing. Enjoy!

Gerry:
You’ve been an advocate of – I think you’ve called it an “evolution design strategy”. Can you tell me what you mean by that and whether it’s at odds with the current trend towards sticking the word “innovation” on everything?

David:
… For many years we have been practicing what I call an evolution design strategy, which is specifically linked to ThinkPad. When I first took over the management responsibilities of the design of ThinkPad a lot of people asked me “So what are we going to do with the next generation design?” And my theory was if it wasn’t broken, I don’t really think we should fix it. I don’t think we need a new design. This was way back in 1995, when the design of ThinkPad was only three years old. And I didn’t think that we needed a new design, I just felt that we needed to continue to make it better and better.

This is very similar to the way many European car manufacturers have treated the design of their products. One that I use often is the Porsche 911. Every year somebody at Porsche is not trying to figure out what’s this year’s 911 going to look like. What they try to do is improve, enhance it and make the breed better and better and better. And I have always been a very strong advocate of that. And I think it’s connected to the ThinkPad brand. The word “think” obviously suggests thought and thoughtfulness and I think that means that the design had to have thought and thinking behind it. We shouldn’t do things arbitrarily, we should do them if we believe that the solution is truly better.

Source: [InfoDesign] via [Design Matters]

While Lenovo’s Q4 financial results might have been a strong improvement, the PC manufacturer still felt some additional job cuts were necessary to keep the organization streamlined.

30 workers’ positions were eliminated at the U.S. corporate headquarters in Morrisville, North Carolina, out of the 1600 employed there. This represents about 2% of their global workforce.

They did confirm that no additional cuts are being made at this time.

Source: [Local Tech Wire]

It appears Lenovo forgot to do their international trademark research and are now under a restraining order preventing them from using the term “smartbook” within Germany. The company Smartbook AG holds the trademark rights inside Deutschland and got a court to stop Lenovo in their tracks.

Smartbook AG was tactful enough to point out that Lenovo is liable for a penalty up to €250K (approx. $344K USD) for every time ’smartbook’ is used “as part of commercial correspondence in the Federal Republic of Germany.” Lenovo representatives are aware of the court ruling, but are not commenting at this time.

It’s not like Smartbook AG did this out of the blue, having sued Lenovo’s partner Qualcomm for the same infringement and also sent a nastygram to German netbook blog Netbooknews.de for even using the coveted term.

It will be interesting to see how Lenovo handles this. Is it as simple as marketing their smartbook Skylight smartbook as a smartbook everywhere except Germany smartbook? Or will they market their smartbook as something other than a smartbook inside Germany smartbook? Only smartbook will tell.

Source: [PCWorld]