It appears we have a little shoving match going on between Lenovo and Toughbook manufacturer Panasonic. If you missed the original announcement, read up on Lenovo’s semi-rugged ThinkPads. ChannelWeb quotes ThinkPad director Tom Ribble, as below:

“The truth is we’ve always built tough laptops that can weather extreme conditions from hiking the rain forests of the Amazon to flying in space. You don’t need a PC that looks like a tank to excel in harsh environments and, unlike many of our competitors, we don’t put an extra charge on toughness,” Tom Ribble, Lenovo’s executive director of worldwide ThinkPad product marketing, said in a statement that appears to double as a not-so-thinly-veiled jab at Panasonic and its Toughbook line of notebooks.

A Panasonic representative is quoted as replying:

“It is interesting that Lenovo says it has taken existing machines and put them through some testing and are now calling them semi-rugged,” said Walls. “Our approach is to build machines from the inside out in order to make machines semi- or fully rugged. If you’re going to build a machine that holds up in mission-critical environments, a company needs to build them in their own factory-like we do-and do the research and development-that we do-to make sure machines are reliable.”

Hit the link below to read the rest of the quotes and context here, but I’m going to beat up on Mr. Walls’ points here just a little.

Lenovo isn’t just taking ThinkPads, running them through some tests for fun, and “oh surprise” they come out doing well. ThinkPads were designed from the beginning to be tough and reliable, without compromising usability or functionality. For many years before these tests on new models were publicized, ThinkPads have been tested against the MIL-SPEC criteria and come out doing exceedingly well for a “business notebook.” This is not new and these aren’t just “existing machines,” they are “existing machines whose entire legacy was focused around durability and reliability without compromising usability.” But since Lenovo threw the first slap here, I’ll say Panasonic’s snarky comeback isn’t exactly unjustified.

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