Last week I had lunch with the guys over at Lenovo and after last night’s Hewlett Packard launch in France, you can easily recognise why Lenovo a Chinese Company is stripping share away from Hewlett Packard.
The HP launch was all glitz, instead of a CES or IFA in Berlin HP chose the New York Times International Luxury Conference in Versailles to roll out their flashy new premium notebook for the simple reason that HP see their brands sitting alongside brands such as Coco Chanel, Brigitte Bardot, Pierre Balmain, Dior or Louis Vuitton all brands that actually don’t make technology products.
Unlike the latest Lenovo offering the HP device had what is often associated with glitzy products, gold trim, matt black and sleek packaging.
But is that what is needed today? as the PC market slips into a world of tablets with keypads and super smartphones with OLED display and blisteringly fast processors.
What Lenovo has done is deliver what I think is one of the smartest PC devices to hit the market in years.
The ThinkPad X1 tablet is a Lenovo product designed for the B2B market though I do think it would go gangbusters if sold via mass retail stores in business districts.
It’s a regular 12-inch tablet powered by Intel’s latest Core m7 chipset, but it’s the flexibility of the device that sets it apart from the glitzy HP offering.
And if you want the same grunt as the HP Spectre you can aways buy the all new Lenovo Think Pad X1 Yoga which is getting rave reviews around the world. At least you won’t look like someones handbag with your glitzy gold trimmed HP Spectre.
With the new HP Spectre product you can clearly see that HP engineers and they have a lot of them who love to stick their two bobs worth into the designing of a product, which is why most HP products in the past have looked dead set boring, have struggled to create a product that is truly different.
The ThinkPad X1 tablet is the ultimate Swiss Army Knife of PC because it is flexible, incredible well designed and easy to cart around.
Lenovo is known for its unique take on the laptop with its flipping and twisting Yoga series, and now they have modularised a tablet whereby you can easily plug in an additional five hours of battery life, or you can simply plug in a projector which you can use in a business meeting or back in a hotel room.
The core part of the ThinkPad X1 looks like any other Windows tablet, it has a great keyboard and display, the big difference is that you can attach three modules to the bottom to transform it into a laptop, projector, or a 3D camera which is ideal in the health professionals.
The base elements of the ThinkPad X1 keyboard is a full ThinkPad keyboard with a TrackPoint and trackpad, the keyboard module attaches magnetically to the bottom of the ThinkPad X1 tablet alongside the additional module.
There’s even an active stylus if you’re interested in sketching, but it’s optional extra.
The kickstand has a tiny latch at the rear that releases it, and it adjusts to a number of angles due to new hinge technology developed by Lenovo.
When it comes to hinges which I believe is a key element in today’s PC form factor Lenovo is seriously leading the pack.
The attach modules look like battery packs, and the “productivity” one extends battery life by an additional five hours while delivering additional HDMI and USB ports which are missing from the HP spectre.
Lenovo’s “presenter” module includes a Pico projector to project a 60-inch display out of the bottom of the ThinkPad X1.
Another model has Intel’s RealSense camera built in that allows a user to capture and edit objects for 3D printing.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
The modules are easy to pack away in a bag because they are thin and light. All you do is strip away the cover on the base and plug in the module you need.
It’s easy and gets even easier the more you do it.
What this product and the Think Pad Xi Carbon delivers is almost everything that is in the HP Spectre which while thin is tizzy and missing a lot of practical capabilities found in a new generation Lenovo PC’s and that includes their really slick Yoga range of PC’s.
