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by Nicholas Aaron Khoo, Singapore
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ThinkPads--before and after Lenovo
Sep 30, 2008 03:18I came across this rather lively discussion on ZDNet editor-in-chief Larry Dignan's blog. Basically, he compared some consumer reports of ThinkPads during the IBM days and now in the Lenovo days.
(Picture taken of the ThinkPad X200 on the Canon PowerShot S5 IS, both gadgets of which I'm currently reviewing in my travels).
I thought his conclusion that "Lenovo seems to be carrying the ThinkPad torch at least as well as IBM did" was pretty fair, though it did invoke some lively discussion there.
OK, first let me come clean.
I have always been somewhat of a ThinkPad fanboi, PRE-Lenovo days. And I must confess I abandoned my beloved and jumped ship after Lenovo took over. To be fair, it wasn't just IBM selling out on the ThinkPads, there was also the allure of the tablet PCs just entering the market then. You know, touch?
Anyway, having been tempted to look at how my first love has been doing all this while, I requested a unit of the X200 for a week's review together with some extensive travelling.
And as I mentioned before, I was fairly suprised how well Lenovo has preserved the Thinkpads, to some extent even enhancing it.
When I say preserve, I mean what the brand Thinkpad stands for, at least to me - quality, performance for business users, touch, mobility, efficiency, and more.
You see I like many others thought that all these went out of the window after IBM sold out.
How wrong I was.
'Enhancing' in my personal opinion because my Thinkpads (at least those that I owned) never had active harddisk protection, HSPDA, biometrics sign-on, long battery life, and such a nice trackpoint!
To be honest, the X200 was a tad slow probably because I was only loaned a 1GB RAM model to run with Windows Vista Business. And the speakers were kind of soft. But I can easily upgrade the RAMs and speakers are not really important for business users in my opinion?
And just in case you think I'm totally sold out to Lenovo, I'm actually eagerly awaiting the Dell E Series too :p
(Just a quick piece from a dinghy cybercafe in Ho Chi Minh City)
- Talkback
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yes indeed Lenovo was conservative in their approach in transitioning the 'thinkpad' branding & has evolved as one (who else) of China's reliable product, except when the US Department of Defense (or at least the CIA) abandoned their purchase of Lenovo's suspecting that info-pirating/spying gadgetry is lurking inside their systems, losing a bit of their market share which comes apparent in their desire to gain demand outside the corporate world.
Sep 30, 2008 08:32
bobbyjaniro: your segment is out of place here, do your spamming somewhere else..
Sep 30, 2008 08:33
Thanks for the helpful comments ferdiei :)
Sep 30, 2008 11:09
You should make an article on Maxtor, before and after Seagate.
But this is opposite, in the sense that I specifically blacklisted maxtor from my office, and use only seagate
Sep 30, 2008 12:42
heh maybe I'll do that after my maxtor crashes.... wait. I don't have a maxtor anymore. Bleh.
Sep 30, 2008 17:17
I was a fan of Thinkpad (T40 to T43) but after Chinese took over....
1. A few more features were added and impressed me.
2. I bought T61 and many of my colleagues bought T61 since it was corporate policy to get Thinkpad.
It was a piece of junk due to the following:
1. When booting up, sometimes the cursor is unable to detect.
2. When doing your work, your laptop goes into a memory dump mode.
It is just not me but all my colleagues experienced the same problems, so Chinese laptops are as good as Chinese Milk scandals. As usual, you called the hotline, they tell you it "could be your software corruption etc", there is no problem with Thinkpad. My configuration was really basic and the softwares were the same ones I used on T40 to T43.
Yeah... I saw the Lenovo CEO said a few things such as innovative features such as face recognition etc. But if the laptop does not work well, then what use of these features?
I bought a basic Acer Laptop below $1000 and $1500 and install the same softwares, no such problem. Would you buy still buy Lenovo? God bless.
Oct 01, 2008 17:04
Hi andyrmit, this is the first Thinkpad I tried after Lenovo took over and honestly I was rather impressed with it. I heard the unit I'm reviewing is the first in Singapore but still it was pretty stable. I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience with the T61 though..
Oct 02, 2008 01:51
i am not a new user of lenovo. i also bought another model from lenovo, you cannot hear the volume even you max it, it was a design flaw. I went to the tech centre and they told me it was the design and there was nothing they could do. I paid about $2500 for that and regretted. Even the power supply was really hot, you touched it, it was like touching hot water.
And the new thinkpad is adopted the same old power supply but maybe the overheating problem was resolved.
Thinkpad? Are you guys serious? Skip it.. go buy NEC, Acer, Fujitsu or even Dell(dont like this brand, the support is really bad)
Oct 02, 2008 09:09
I didn't seem to have a problem with the power supply. For the speakers, I did notice it was soft, but not the way you described it. I managed to show some music to a dinner table of 6 with rowdy kids and they could hear the music but I wished it could be louder.. I've tried all the brands you mentioned, I think the Thinkpad keyboard is still the best of the lot IMHO. The latest Dell E Series has spent a lot of money to rework their keyboard though, I'm waiting to review it.
Oct 02, 2008 13:23
About Nicholas Aaron Khoo
Nicknamed "Gadget Boy" by friends at age 18 because he used to scribble Grafitti on a PalmPilot faster than most would type, Nicholas Aaron Khoo is web developer turned technopreneur and Singapore tech blogger who also pretends to do strategic advisory for tech startups and 'un'Fortune 500s (when he's not pretending to be the gadget-loaded Batman). A digital nomad, his tech interests range from gadgets, games, tech trends, social media, security, and just about anything that runs on 1s and 0s. See his industry affiliations here.
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