Lenovo Announces the IdeaPad 200
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Is "consumer friendly" just a code word for "cheap"?
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It would suck if I couldn't log into my notebook just because I was wearing my leather bondage hood and bridle.
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Re:At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads. (Score:5, Funny)
"You WILL like Face Recognition Security! Now do as your Mistress Lenovo tells you!"
Re:At Least they aren't changing Thinkpads. (Score:5, Informative)
ThinkPads were developed by IBM, produced for professionals and built like tanks. Lenovo has made a few changes, not all of them good, but basically that design philosophy is intact and a lot of the same people from IBM still work on ThinkPads. The "IdeaPad" line is a rebadge of Lenovo's *own* line (the 3000 series, etc.), which was developed wholly separately, by a different company and in a different country. If the previous lineup was anything to judge by, they're the same basic cheap junk laptops you might find from any second-tier Taiwanese or Chinese company. Adequate for most use, but not even in the same league as a ThinkPad. (I may be a former TP owner, but I'm also a *current* Acer owner, so I'm familiar with both ends of the spectrum here.)
It's not just a case of one being professional and the other consumer, which implies that the differences are mainly in the included software or security features. No, these laptops are built to completely different standards. They're as different as when IBM and Lenovo were making laptops separately. Would a new line from Lenovo have been compared to the ThinkPad in those days? Well, nothing much has changed, except that Lenovo's obviously trying to cash in on the ThinkPad name, and has managed to hoodwink sites like Slashdot into thinking the two lines are somehow related.
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I hope people give the Lenovo brand a chance. They are a nice design change from many of the tired, old designs rolled out over the past 2 ye
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Yawn (Score:5, Funny)
Major hype at business conference before it's release? Nope
TV ad featuring two amusing characters bantering back and forth played at all hours of the day? Nope
CEO with reality distortion field? Nope
I'm bored... moving on.
Re:Yawn (Score:4, Interesting)
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Okay, I'll have a go. HP, Dell, Toshiba: I can't tell you if one is more reliable than the others, but I can tell you if your Dell or HP has an issue and needs service, you will be S.O.L. Those are two of the worst companies to deal with, in terms of customer service. If you buy a laptop from
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Lets call it an "Unnouncement"
Yes, we're going to be doing the same thing as everyone else.
Yes, it will cost about the same amount.
No, we don't really do anything different.
It's a laptop. Huzzah.
face recognition (Score:3, Interesting)
This raises the question: could one just hold up a photograph of the user to log in?
Re:face recognition (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:face recognition (Score:5, Interesting)
Try it with a camcorder w/ built-in LCD panel and I suspect you'll get different results. Use a bigger screen that can show your face at actual life size, and it is almost certain. Most decent face recognition systems can detect a picture because the perspective never changes, but unless it has more than one camera, it will likely be easily fooled by a video clip....
If you're sitting in front of Vista... (Score:2)
But if it's Vista... (Score:2)
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*the less you know, the better
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Also I don't want to lose the joke of "watching someone though their monitor"...
Re:face recognition.. Dual Hard Drive, GEEKS! (Score:2)
How many geeks WOULDN'T like to have TWO internal HDDs? When I laid eyes upon the Gateway P-6301, with a 17" LCD, at $699 (or $649?), all other laptops with S-Vid out, and several other ports I hardly use anyway, were no longer contenders. However, I wish the drive caddies SLID out instead of requiring me to flip over the l/t. However, at least t
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But, what I like is being able to hit F-10, select which disk from which to boot, then select the OS of choice for the task at hand.
Since my P-6301 has TWO CPUs, I *wish* it had the capability (or it does but I don't know how) to run TWO os's simultaneously, independent of needing VMs. Just add a toggle to deal with sharing vide
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Imagine a secret partition on the hard drive that holds (profiled) characteristics of terrorists faces. So the laptop keeps track of whoever is using it, checks it against its secret database, and next time it's connected to the internet, files a report with DHS.
Re:face recognition (Score:5, Funny)
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Consumer friendly?? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Consumer friendly?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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(Note that the first link skips you past the clamshell ones.
To Lenovo I say: welcome to 2001!
Also (Score:2)
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They'll also probably abandon the classic "black brick" Thinkpad styling.
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1. Small screens, from people who don't understand why a notebook needs to be portable.
2. Poor multimedia options, from people who expect a notebook to play Doom 3 in 1080p with surroundsound on a notebook.
3. High price, which is a complaint I might see as legitimate (though, I think that the support Lenovo provides more than justifies the added cost).
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3. High price, which is a complaint I might see as legitimate (though, I think that the support Lenovo provides more than justifies the added cost).
Got a T60, back when that was a decent machine, for 1200 bucks plus some extra for more RAM. In my experience, the "mass market" ThinkPads (T-series) etc. are priced competitively with MacBooks, or maybe it's the other way around. Get into the ultra portables and you're shelling out big bucks real quick. If you work the dell discount machine, you could definitely get a lower price on similar specs. Go lower on the brand name quality scale and you can save yourself a few hundred, but nothing spectacular
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(I haven't used later thinkpads, so maybe they do have them, but all the ones I used had the windows keys mysteriously missing)
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Unfortunately, they already added a Windows key starting with the T60. Probably the single biggest blunder made with the Thinkpad line yet.
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603
Re:Consumer friendly?? (Score:5, Funny)
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(and while you're at it, add the word "droids" to this spell-checker dictionary. Droids has been a real word for decades.)
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This is why all marketing drones should kill themselves. Thank you, Bill [wikipedia.org].
Bizarre... (Score:2)
consumer-friendly companion to the ThinkPads
What's so consumer-unfriendly about thinkpads?
Well, judging from the specs of the IdeaPads, evidently high resolution and a trackpoint must be consumer-unfriendly, and low res and touchpad only are consumer friendly....
I think I'll stick with the ThinkPad line, thanks anyway...
I see that historically the non-thinkpad Lenovo's are cheaper, and I guess that's what they mean, but I don't see anything to distinguish them from every other cheaper laptop in existence.
mod parent up... (Score:2)
Thats the common problem with overinflated product announcements, practically any hyperbole they apply will make previous products from the same company look silly.
But does it run Linux? (Score:2)
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So close, but so far away. Even hackintosh did better with power.
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Considering this, now that I think about it, I am getting more and more worried about this running Linux at all, like you. Wasn't Microsoft hardware device-signing th
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Implications on mac world (Score:2)
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Why would they pre-announce an ultraportable tiny laptop with flash drive and no optical less than 2 weeks from mac world?
Probably because CES is less than 2 weeks before mac world, and this is what companies tend to do at CES?
:)
"Man, why would they eat a lot at Thanksgiving less than a month before Christmas? I bet a little monkey whispered in their ear that Christmas was going to have a big ham, and they don't want to be a me-too, so they announced a big turkey a month earlier."
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It looks to me like Apple is coming out with the ultimate: a super-portable laptop that you slide into the side of a monitor and it becomes your main computer with your optical drive, full keyboard, mouse, and hard drive storing your large data (like most of your tunes and videos and stuff). And you access this data wirelessly when you remove it (to read web pages on the couch or whatever). You can probably even slide it into anybody's 'mac display' and get you
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God, Steve is SUCH an innovator!
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http://techreport.com/discussions.x/12623 [techreport.com]
Re:Implications on mac world- Travesty? (Score:2)
MOST of the components are os-agnostic, anyway. So, I have ALWAYS suspected the existence of BIOS- or motherboard-loaded obfuscatory code m
Please no (Score:5, Interesting)
My customers love their Thinkpads, but I'm going to hate having to tell them that the Lenovos with 17" screens and bright colors on the chassis just aren't the same as the decent ones. Because I know I'll have customers (having years of experience that says "Thinkpad = good laptop") that won't understand the difference until it's too late.
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Wait, are you saying "Ideapad" is the same name as "Thinkpad?" Either I vastly misunderstand how the English language works, or you do.
Kidding aside, Apple had an iBook and a PowerBook for years, and I don't think anybody was confused by the "similar" names. I don't think this is something Lenovo has to worry about, frankly. Competing with HP and Dell in this market segment is going to be more of a challenge than a possibly confusing name.
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No Trackpoint. (Score:5, Insightful)
No trackpoint = no sale.
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It's a no to the Ideapad from me as well, though - but for a different reason: the 15 inch one has the 1280x800 resolution my 4 year old laptop has - and that is one thing I really want to upgrade with my next purchase. And no, I don't want a 17 inch laptop, thanks very much.
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Well, they're making 15" T61p systems with 1920x1200 screens now, that would be a bit of an upgrade from 1280x800...
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Next Up: FreedomPad (Score:5, Funny)
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Specs (Score:2, Informative)
Where's the Cheap Webpads? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Who here immediately thought of the home computer movement decimating the market for terminal servers and cried?
I agree there's a market for such a device, but it isn't as ubiquitous as you think. When I think of the classes of users that use mobile devices (whether laptops, phones, PDAs, iPod Touch, whatever), I see a few basic groups (which are overlapping):
People who like to carry their work home at the end of the day (and maybe work at home)
This group would do fine with a low-end laptop, but mos
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I'm not talking about a standalone device. Not one that would primarily network farther than somewhere in the same building. I'm talking about dinky little interactive displays that are network peripherals for a W/LAN. I agree that symbolic graphics transmission (X, display postscript) would be better, but bitmaps
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I frequently connect to a 1024x768x16bit Windows 2000 server and it's slow and ugly even across my uber fast gigabit office network. Sure, it's serviceable for an admin, but try playing Quake. You get the double dose of VNC input latency and connection latency. Google video even looks like crap.
Until we get near light speed broadband, I don't see this replacing a desktop.
But you idea is definitely cool f
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FWIW, Windows 2000 server would probably need something like gigabit networking to get even close to 100Mbps to a device like this over VNC.
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The pric
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In the bin for ideas that are never going to be commercialized, because there isn't enough profit in it.
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Yes, that is the perfect criticism of the U110, which weighs 1Kg and has an 8 hour battery life (definitely won't be cheap, though).
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Were my phone any larger, it would wind up in the same category as my notebook, which is to say, too much of a hassle to carry with me all the time, everywhe
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That's not exactly what I'm talking about.
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Surround sound?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Does the ThinkPad line come with fewer gimmicks?
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Playing games that bring a little more excitement to the genre than Tuxracer.
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
At last! (Score:3, Funny)
Rejected names (Score:4, Funny)
Faced with the task of coming up with a consistent naming scheme, the following ideas were rejected but could appear as future products:
my dream thinkpad (Score:2)
This is nothing new (Score:2, Interesting)
I refuse to buy one... (Score:2)
Until the writer's strike is resolved, we have no choice but to boycott Len....
oh.
LenoVO.
never mind.
damn (Score:2)
I would hate to see the legacy of just plain good computers be pissed away. Of course, I haven't seen the
Any good photos? (Score:2)
Distracts from issues with TP line (Score:2)
More useless biometric security? (Score:2)
I mean, I thought fingerprint scanning on laptops was a bad idea, but facial recognition? All You have to do to beat this is take a picture of the person, and print it out!
Then, even if you know they can get in, your ****ed, because you can't easily change your face.
As a Thinpad T61p owner.... (Score:2)
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So, now the Chinese are aping the Japanese method and renamed the thinkpad the ideapad?
No, they're simply ridding the Lenovo line of any trace of the old IBM culture and trademarks. Thirty years ago, IBM employees used to go to the nearest office supply cabinet, and pull out these little pocket notepads with a leatherette cover. On the leatherette cover, only the word "THINK" was printed, in gold foil lettering. It became so ingrained in the IBM employee culture that the name ThinkPad was an obvious choice for the laptop when it was released. Lenovo isn't IBM.
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William
Re:Ordinary Motors! Common Oil!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Nope (Score:2)
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Re:Seems like it could be a winner. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.