Geek Swagger.
Posts tagged Lenovo
CES 2009
Jan 15th
Today I'm going to continue our trip through early-2009 conventions by talking about some of the announcements from CES that I thought were interesting.
Let's start with the keynote. This was the first year that Bill Gates wasn't the headliner, but I think Steve Ballmer did a good job as far as Microsoft keynotes go. They didn't really announce much, and a lot of the cool stuff was just review of what we've known for a while. It seemed like a sort of "State of the Union" Microsoft style, where-in the crew informed the crowd about all of the great things the company has been up to for the past year. The highlight was definitely the demo of Windows 7, as well as the (predictable) announcement that the Windows 7 public beta would be out soon. It's out now and I've had an opportunity to play with it a bit, but that's for another day. To see the demo, you can check it out here:
The other major announcement that's caught a lot of people by surprise was the "rebirth" of Palm in the form of the Palm Pre. I have to say I met this bit of news with a great deal of anticipation, but then I watched the presentation and I was stunned. The Palm Pre (running Palm's new Web OS) is, in my opinion, the first true competitor to the iPhone. Of course this is all speculation right now because a device looking cool in a demonstration and actually being cool in your hand are two different things, but Palm seems to be the first company since Apple to use the "Apple approach" in creating a touchscreen smartphone. The OS looks great, featuring an easy-to-manipulate interface and some features that might even have iPhone users drooling. I'll save the details for a later post so I can dedicate enough words to the device to do it justice. Just know I was impressed. You can view the Palm presentation here:
Other than that most of the announcements were hardware and gadget-based. It's impossible to do a complete rundown of all of the devices that were announced, so instead I'll just mention a couple of the things that caught my eye. Firstly, the Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is worth mentioning because it has a freakin' slide-out screen! Pretty cool. Also pretty expensive. This new laptop is meant to be a desktop replacement, and finally solves the conundrum of enhancing a laptop's monitor size without sacrificing portability. It's obvious you can hook most laptops up to an external display, but as I mentioned, you lose the ability to roam because your computer is tethered to that display. The W700ds solves this problem by having a 10" slide-out display, giving the user a whole lot of LCD goodness. It's a little niche, but apparently the W700ds has been targeted towards artists since it has built-in Wacom functionality. Not to mention a $3,663 starting price tag. Ouch.
Camera and display technology was also a big hit this year at CES, but I'm going to stay with notebook computers. The Dell Adamo looks quite stunning. It's a very thin machine sporting an almost Macbook Air-like quality to it. The Adamo has been branded a "luxury laptop." It's extremely thin and has some industrial design that's only rivaled by Apple's line of notebooks. Dell was kind of sketchy on the details but it seemed to me that the notebook wouldn't be the only computer or device in the line, perhaps they're looking to debut some multimedia devices with it as well? At any rate this is a product to keep your eyes on, if only because it looks so cool.
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The netbook explosion
Aug 28th
If you subscribe to any of the gadget site feeds as I do you might have noticed a trend as of late - everyone is working on a netbook. Â If you're not sure what I'm talking about let me give a little background. Â Around the time that the XO laptop (OLPC) and Asus' Eee PC were announced a lot of people weren't sure whether these ultra-small, lightweight and inexpensive machines would be profitable. Â Did they really have a specific use? Â For the most part, to compensate for the lower price and smaller size, these machines didn't have the processing power found in your average laptop or notebook computer. Â They also were originally based on various distributions of Linux, taking advantage of the operating system's lightweight system requirements.
As it turns out these first couple forays into the world of netbooks were very successful. Â Since that time Asus has released and announced several different versions of its Eee PC, and other manufacturers like , , and of all places are jumping in with their own netbook offerings. Â Obviously there's a market for netbooks, but who is prone to use one? Â When I first saw the Eee PC I though to myself "Wow, that's really cool - having a tiny machine for casual use would be great!" Â Then, at the same time, I remembered that I have a 2-year old Macbook that is plenty small and outperforms it. Â On top of that I purchased an iPod Touch not too long ago and I find myself using that more than anything for when I just need to check a website or do basic computing functions. Â Netbooks kind of fall in between these two product ranges so it's hard for me to justify using one.
I suppose the people that will use one will be business travelers who are interested in having a very small, convenient computer that's easy to take with them. Â I have to say though, as more and more of these come out and the performance improves they become increasingly interesting. Â They'd be amazing for a school situation - give every student in a middle school access to an unimposing netbook that's relatively inexpensive and integrate that into their curriculum. Â Or imagine having them available for rent on planes. Â Instead of having to worry about carrying on your potentially bulky laptop you could rent a netbook for $5 and have access to your email, the internet and maybe do some word processing along the way.
I think that netbooks do have a future in the industry but I'm still not sure where they fit. Â Asus can't have only sold so many units to people falling for the wow-factor, right? Â We're on the cusp of the cellphone making the step up from telephone to computing device, and in the interim perhaps netbooks fill the gap. Â I think for them to really take of it'll require a bit more attention paid to the original premise of a netbook - cheap. Â A lot of the most recent versions have started to creep up into the $500-$600 range where you can just as easily purchase a low-end PC. Â I'd also like to see a lot better battery life. Â If I could get a netbook with a battery that lasted all day (8 hour estimate) that would be a huge feature which traditional laptops don't provide. Â For now though, I think I'll stick with my collection of devices to get the job done.
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