Lenovo Announces the IdeaPad

An anonymous reader writes "Marking the start of news releases from this year's Consumer Electronics Show, Lenovo has dropped a major announcement on consumers - the arrival of a new line of notebooks. The IdeaPads will be the consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads. The announcement covers three notebooks, the 17" Y710, the 15" Y510, and the 11", 2.4lb U110. The IdeaPads will bring a number of firsts to Lenovo's notebooks, including a SSD upgrade option, dual hard drives (Y710 only), and a 17" notebook."

At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads.

[Hawkeye05]

I don't know how i feel about this, I love Thinkpads and I'm glad there not changing them to make them more consumer friendly, yet i worry this will draw their attention away from the Thinkpads.

Consumer friendly??

[damn_registrars]

From the summary:

The IdeaPads will be the consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads.

WTF wasn't consumer friendly about the ThinkPad? Granted, I've been a big ThinkPad fan for some time myself, but really, what are they talking about? How do you make a notebook more consumer-friendly? For that matter, how could a notebook not be consumer friendly and sell?

No Trackpoint.

[MythMoth]

For me, and other trackpoint addicts,

No trackpoint = no sale.

Where's the Cheap Webpads?

[Doc Ruby]

We don't need all these dinkier notebooks or "tablet PCs". Because they're expensive and suck a lot of power (therefore are heavy and don't last long between charges). These portable PCs are too big, and mobile phones are too small.

What we need are lightweight little touchtablets running VNC. That weigh a handful of ounce, unfold from 8" to 17", last a week on a charge, and cost under $100. All they have to do is display a remote tappable desktop, with mutable little speakers, maybe bluetooth headphones/keyboards for occasional use. Live on WiFi.

There's a thousand models of the "mobile desktop relacement". What we need is little devices that are just little controllers for all the media and info consumption we do when we're away from workstations, and want to do more than talk or look up some factoid on a phone. If they were cheap enough, people would buy a bunch to leave all over the place where we might just pick them up.

Re:face recognition

[Jeremy.DeGroot]

Some recent ThinkPads have face recognition as well. I recently purchased this one [tigerdirect.com], and it has this feature. For those of you that are interested, it recognizes me with or without glasses, right after waking up and right before stepping out for New Years' Eve. We tried fooling it with a 4x6 photo held close to the web cam, and it didn't work. YMMV.

Surround sound?!

[DirkGently]

WTF are 4 speakers and a subwoofer doing in a laptop?

Does the ThinkPad line come with fewer gimmicks?

Re:Consumer friendly??

[Itchyeyes]

"Consumer friendly" is business-speak for "cheap crap"

Re:At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads.

[jpu8086]

Drop the non-apple qualifier. ThinkPads are *the* best laptops. EOF.

Re:Consumer friendly??

[damn_registrars]

Maybe they add a windows key

That could actually be valid. My ThinkPad R32 came with XP Pro, and did not have a windows key. I am typing this reply on a new touchpoint keyboard from IBM (one of the last made with the IBM logo on it), and it mysteriously has no windows key. Equally interesting is that IBM actually gives credit on the backside of said keyboard to Microsoft for the Windows logo, even though said logo appears nowhere on the keyboard itself.

Not that I miss not having one anyways...

And I see that even the newest "ThinkPad Keyboard" [lenovo.com] from IBM seems to be missing the windows key.

Re:At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads.

[PopeRatzo]

I have to agree. I especially like the looks of the Ideapad 110. I'm not sure about this "Face Recognition Security" though. I tend to shave every 4 or 5 days, and sometimes I've got glasses and sometimes not. Sometimes my eyes are red and bloodshot and sometimes they're... well, they're usually red and bloodshot.

It would suck if I couldn't log into my notebook just because I was wearing my leather bondage hood and bridle.

Re:Ordinary Motors! Common Oil!!!

[foobsr]

Think does come from

"Thomas J. Watson coined the motto Think while managing the sales and advertising departments at the National Cash Register Company, saying "Thought has been the father of every advance since time began. 'I didn't think' has cost the world millions of dollars." In 1914 he brought the motto with him to CTR, which later became IBM." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Think [wikipedia.org]

Think about it, it seems obvious.

CC.

Re:Seems like it could be a winner.

[pionzypher]

I always thought that they looked really dorky and clunky. A friend had one he wanted to sell( a T23, back in 2004) for a reasonable price. I was impressed with the solid build they had and the little features (the led on the top of the screen for night sessions was great). It worked well with linux and took a hell of a beating. I finally trashed it this last year. I was a little sketchy on getting another one now that Lenovo had taken over the reigns, but figured I'd give it a shot. I grabbed a lenovo R61i from Compusa @ their going OOB sale for fairly cheap and have been very happy with it. Ubuntu 7.10 booted right up and detected everything perfectly. The only thing I haven't used or tried to get working is the fingerprint scanner.

All in all, still a solid laptop brand from my experience. It will be interesting to see how these home user styled boxes fare. I wish more B&M stores carried the brand though. Compusa was the only one in my area that had them.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I heard, it was impossible to buy a ThinkPad without Vista pre-installed. I'm indeed concerned about being able to run Linux (it tends to be flexible enough, and distros nowadays are getting much better at hardware support).

For the T61, at least, there is an option to get XP Professional. I bought a T61 two weeks ago. I got it with Vista Home Basic, though, since that took $45 off the price. Right now it has Ubuntu 7.10 installed and everything works perfectly, even suspend and hibernate (first time I've ever seen that work in Linux). The Intel X3100 driver has one annoying limitation, though: you can't use Compiz and play video at the same time. Hopefully that will be fixed in time for 8.04, especially considering many laptops that come preloaded with Linux come with the X3100 (Dell, System76, etc).

Read up on it [thinkwiki.org].