If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to Colours Magazine's RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
What words come to your mind when you think of IBM? I get the following:
- Black
- Every thing Same
- Routine
- Boring
- Reliable
Most of the above words are good if your target market is the server rooms of the corporate giants, though not so good if you are targeting the hip young professional working in the design industry, or the college student whose computing needs mainly revolve around typing essays and browsing the web or your everyday person who logs on to the computer to check email or to do the occasional surfing. Perhaps it was for this reason that IBM’s PC dvision, most commonly knows as ‘Lenovo’ was sold off, after it failed to compete with Dell and HP.
Till recently Lenovo has been following the IBM routine, nothing major has changed, nothing that can be called truly innovative has come out of Lenovo, not until recently when they announced the Thinkpad W700 aimed at photographers and designers. Why am I excited? Lenovo has come out with a Thinkpad notebook with integrated Wacom digitizer and an integrated colour calibration system. This is not all, you can have a Qaud Core Intel processor, upto 8GB of RAM in some models , around a max of 900GB of storage space and upto 1GB of video memory on an inbuilt nVidia graphics card. All of this makes it pretty exciting and I bet a tad pricey too.
Only time will tell how well does the notebook behave and what sort of a market penetration does it get. Apple has already got a very well established brand with photographers and designers, and to make some one move over from Apple to Lenovo will be pretty hard. Where Lenovo have got their work cut out for them, they certainly have made a move in the right direction, the next thing is to make the notebook available in colours other than Black. Black is so 90s.
I personally have been using IBM Thinkpads (I use the name IBM as they were manufactured before Lenovo was seperated from IBM), and I swear by them. My notebooks have proven to be very reliable, very robust, especially when used in exptreme conditions. They have been banged aroud in my travels as you can tell from the sruface marks, however, not once have they failed on me and it would be interesting to see how this stands against them.
Links
Lenovo Blog with more information on W700 : Lenovo W700 info
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Sadly, it doesn’t really matter how excellent they make for those of us who have migrated over to Mac’s… It was never really the hardware that made us switch over to OS X. Yup, Apple products are a lot prettier and actually ‘designed’ rather than assembled. But that is slowly changing as more manufacturers realise that we have actually left the twentieth century and want technology products that reflect that. Or just copy Apple. Either is good…
I wasn’t even that OS X is pretty as hell, intuitive and unbelievably reliable… As we didn’t really know that before we migrated to land of aluminium clad beauty.
It was simply that Windows had got so far up our nose, that the irritation was no longer psychologically tolerable; or in the case of my business, feasible, as Vista had decided to self destruct and take my company profiles, software and data with it.
Given that this little portable imaging power-house is going to need Windows (in some flavour) for us pro photographers to use it so it can meet our business needs (just not going to happen with Linux – sorry) – I doubt its statistics and hardware abilities are going to even make us consider a switch back.
A great shame, as it really does have some features that make it very appealing as a business (and even personal) tool. And therefore potentially a very excellent upgrade for those currently using Windows and not wanting to make the jump to OS X.
Stewart, I have to say that I agree with you. For those who have jumped ship already there is no point. Your frustration with windows is easily understandable, had it not been for Windows XP, I would have done the same. Every single version of Windows has been a cause of concern for me, including Vista, the only one which has run for months without crashing is XP and hence I am sticking with it for the moment.
Migration to Apple is a costy initiative, hence I am going to wait till Windows 7, or whatever it is going to be called and see how it plays out. If it performs the same as Vista has done then I am definately going to go the Mac route. Laptop wise, if I do go over, I am going to miss the thinkpad. They just work, not the most pleasent thing for the eyes, but they just work – atleast they have done so for me. If there were two things I had to pick out from my most used items, for reliability, then it would have to be my Blackberry and my Thinkpad Laptop.