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New Lenovo Smartphones are Pretty Weird

September 6, 2015 By Kenneth Scott 2 Comments

New Lenovo Smartphones - Phab Plus phablet

The Lenovo Phab Plus

The new Lenovo smartphones are weird-looking, weird-manufactured, simply put, weird. Among other announcements, Lenovo randomly showcased new smartphone lines. Not a single one of them will be released in North America.

The Motorola parent company has some peculiar things planned for Europe, China and the Middle East. It’s like they are living in a completely different world.

I don’t like phablets and I don’t understand their appeal. Huge blocks just aren’t my thing.

However, Lenovo is still trying to make this trend popular and the company is embracing phablets like never before.

The base Phab model has a 6.98-inch screen that sports a 1080p display and mid-range specs. Cough up more cash and you’ll get an upgraded Phab dubbed Phab Plus with better innards but a smaller screen. The Phab Plus has a 6.8-inch 1080p display, 2 gigs of RAM and a Qualcomm 615 proc.

Both of them reside on the mid-tier category, performance wise.

The Lenovo Vibe S1

Basically, Lenovo just stretched everything so they can plaster the phablet tag.

Lenovo’s head of PR notes that their new devices will remove the dilemma that usually comes when users want to choose between a smartphone with a big screen and a small tablet. I don’t understand what they are talking about. Nobody, and I mean not a single soul on this planet has this dilemma. You either want a smartphone or a tablet. You don’t lose sleep at night weighing the pros and cons.

But wait, Lenovo being weird doesn’t end here.

Take the Vibe S1. It has two front facing cameras especially designed for selfies. The smartphone’s main sensor is a 8 megapixel camera unit. The second one has 2 megapixels and it’s a depth-sensing camera so selfie aficionados can add all sort of peculiar effects, like bokeh.

However, the Vibe S1 comes with some pretty more-than-decent specs. It features a MediaTek proc, which doesn’t really shout reliable, but you’ll get 3 gigs of RAM and, get this, 160 gigs of storage.

The Lenovo Vibe P1

Wait, there’s more.

A couple of new Lenovo smartphones that feature a pretty cool gimmick are the Vibe P1 and the Vibe P1m – who brands these phones? ‘Cause my 12-year-old cousin could do a better job.

The gimmick is that both smartphones come with a physical switch which the user can use to put the device into a power-saving mode.

Oh, yeah right, they also come with humongous batteries.

The P1m has a 5.5-inch screen, a 720p display and a 4,000mAh battery!
The P1 comes with a 5-inch screen, a better 1080p display and a 5,000mAh battery!

What’s the battery life, I wonder?

The P1 also weighs 6.67 ounces. For a smartphone that isn’t light at all.

These new Lenovo smartphones will hit stores in the following months. Unfortunately, for some I guess, North America won’t get its dose of weirdness.

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Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2015 Review

August 27, 2015 By Kenneth Scott 1 Comment

Not that many laptop brands have lasted as long as Lenovo’s ThinkPad product-line. Its success has led to Lenovo hybrids and Ultrabooks. The company’s latest laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2015, is a flag-ship Ultrabook which sports a superb design wrapped around a magnesium alloy and carbon fibre build.

The third iteration to bear the name Carbon follows the 2012 and 2014 releases. Lenovo doesn’t just staple the Carbon name onto the same old rehashed device. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon competes with top-of-the-shelf laptops from Apple and Dell. It’s also more business oriented and it comes packed with an extended warranty, vPro and TPM.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Review

It has a high-resolution, top-notch screen, with an excellent and comfortable keyboard, it’s lightweight sporting a beautiful exterior design, and the three year warranty is just the bomb.

The thing is, for the $1,900 price tag, it isn’t the best one in its price range. Battery life is great, but it gets beaten elsewhere, it’s bigger and heavier than its rival, and because it’s so business oriented it makes Lenovo pump up the price a bit.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Design and Build Quality

It’s beautiful and sleek, with a powerful vibe to it. It comes with a matte black finish, a red trackpoint and a diagonal retro logo. It shouts ThinkPad from its every screw.

The Carbon stays true to its ThinkPad origins and the machine favors being practical over little gimmicks. Dedicated buttons have been augmented onto the trackpoint and the capacitive functions keys are now binned, featuring more practical physical keys. It’s something that we would have just loved for the second gen 2014 model. It’s a nice addition, more so considering that Lenovo has clearly been listening to its community.

The machine is built out of high-quality materials, there is no doubt here. But Lenovo doesn’t showcase this in detriment of the device’s practicality. Aluminium and magnesium stand at the core of build-materials. If they were to use only aluminium, the machine would be slippery and it would have been riddled with scratches from God knows where

The panel found on the rear of the machine’s display is built from fine carbon-fibre. Other gaps found on the Carbon are filled with reinforced fibre made out of plastic. At the touch, the blackness feels soft and smooth.

I’ve got no quarrel with how Lenovo constructed their machine. It’s lightweight and sturdy because of the materials used.

The Carbon was never constructed with design in mind just for design’s sake. This means that the latest Apple MacBook Pro, or the Dell XPS 13 are better looking. They are sleeker, and subsequently more desirable. The ThinkPad has been built with business in mind – elegant, simple but capable of doing the exact same thing other flag-ship laptops boast about.

Even though it’s business-aimed, it’s an Ultrabook, clearly. The Carbon X1 weighs 1.31 kilos, which is just a couple of grams lighter than the MacBook Pro. Surprisingly, Lenovo’s machine is just about as thick as the 13-inch MacBook Air.

It’s more than great, but it’s worth noting that there are other consumer machines which are smaller, and lighter. The Dell XPS 13, revised, is about 15 millimeters thin and weighs 1.17 kilos.

It’s not something noticeable at first, but if you carry it on a day to day basis, it will pull on your shoulder more, and your carry-bag will be a little bit bigger.

It has better components when compared to the 2014 second gen model. The machine is 4G-ready, it has a dual-band 802.11ac wireless support and the TPM and vPro are included to assure security for businesses – this isn’t something that you will be get if you choose to acquire a Dell or a MacBook.

Indeed, it can be upgraded, but not by much. The RAM is soldered in place, but you can lift the base panel and gain access to the M.2 SSD, the wireless card and other internals.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Screen and Sound Quality

The X1 Carbon has a 14-inch display and a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 – the display panel is of IPS descent. With a pixel density of 210ppi it’s borderline excellent, however Apple’s latest MacBook features 227ppi. Though, the difference isn’t noticeable at all.

Because of the screen’s high density images, icons and text are sharp and clear.

You’ll be using the scaling option for Windows. If you opt-in for a native res, then the OS will look small and it will become barely usable.

Unfortunately, third party tools still don’t get as much support as we would have wanted. It isn’t a huge issue, but it’s worth mentioning that there will be minor pixelation problems and other visual artefacts present. It has improved, a lot I might add, but OS X is by far the better one.

It has a fantastic 6,584k color temperature, but the XPS 13 beats it, slightly. In fact, ThinkPad’s rivals end up in the lead in almost every department. Brightness levels are better than Dell’s XPS, but when comparing black points Dell, once again, takes first place.

However, both of them are exquisite.

Lenovo features a 1,013:1 contrast. Dell is superior with 1,505:1. Yet again, another area where the Carbon falls a little bit short.

The X1 has a high-quality sharpness and it can handle anything photo-edit related, but Apple’s latest MacBook has flawless viewing angles and much better scaling due to its OS X.

Sound-quality wise, speakers are quite good, but they have too much middle. This means that volume is plentiful, but treble takes a beating. Sound doesn’t seem to have the required high-punch in order to really stand out.

What I found impressive is how much bass the laptop can output. Unfortunately, it gets swamped and sound is buried under a stew of high-pitched noises trying to make themselves heard.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Performance

The ThinkPad X1 comes packed with a Core i7-5600U proc that outweighs Dell’s XPS. It’s even faster due to it having 400MHz. The L3 cache can stretch the power even further with Turbo Boost.

Clearly, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon beats Dell in the performance department, but it doesn’t pack enough punch to make a clear ground between itself and Apple’s MacBook machine. It came as quite the shock because Apple’s laptop has a Core i5 proc. Under closer investigation, you can observe that Apple’s machine has a more powerful and faster chip – 100MHz faster.

MacBook’s GPU also overpowers Lenovo’s – it’s an Intel Iris 6100, which is better than X1’s HD Graphics 5500 chipset.

Benchmark tests is where both machines prove their worth. Although the Carbon scored 17.1 frame per second in the Unigine Heaven gaming test, it comes dead second in Geekbench. It barely scored 5,194. Apple’s MacBook managed a whooping 7,010.

Bottomline is that both machines output a decent amount of speed for work related tasks. Your usual office apps run without issues. Photo editing tools work flawless. Only the most demanding programs will make the X1 struggle.

Storage tests proved that the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is quite the beast. That is, if it’s compared with average laptops that come equipped with an HDD. The X1 M.2 Samsung SSD is by far quicker than any hard drive, but it’s sequential read and write speeds aren’t enough to compete with Apple’s machine.

Lenovo’s 482MB/s read speed and 256MB/s write speed doesn’t compare with Apple’s 645MB/s and 1.2GB/s.

There were no issues regarding heating or too much noise. The i7 proc reached a high of 68 degrees and little to none heat got out of the laptop.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Battery Life

During a standard 40 percent brightness test, the ThinkPad lasted 9 hours and 50 minutes. This is more than great, but its rivals performed better. The Dell XPS 13 almost reached the half day mark, and the MacBook Pro went over it.

The Carbon is pretty good in this area, but its competitors take the gold.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Keyboard and Trackpad

Lenovo’s ThinkPads are considered to have one of the best keyboards on the market. The third gen X1 Carbon had big shoes to fill.

Initially I thought that because the Carbon was so lightweight and slim, Lenovo had to cut down somewhere, and that somewhere had to be the keyboard area. Quality remains unhindered. Keys are still large with a deep dip so you can type better and faster. Typing is consistent and responsive, it’s soft and comfortable. No criticism here.

The third gen Carbon has a better trackpad than its previous gen brother, and its two built-in buttons are highly responsive. The points can feel a little bit twitchy, initially, but it has to be this way for a longer use. Its more than decent.

Lenovo’s keyboard remains reigning king, but the trackpad? Not so much. MacBook Pro’s Force TouchPad is better. But to be honest, this is a matter of taste. Needless to say, both of them are great.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Miscellaneous

The most expensive Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon costs $2650. But there are cheaper configs available. You can choose from various options that include, or exclude touchscreens. You can choose a 1920 x 108 res or a 2560 x 1440 one. You can even choose models with more, or less RAM and storage.

The cheapest Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon costs $1,900 and it comes packed with a 1920 x 1080 res display, non-touchscreen however, 4 gigs of RAM, an SSD comprised of 128 gigs and an Intel Core i5 5200U proc.

If you want to compare the Lenovo with its competitors, you should know that the MacBook Air’s cheapest model retails at $1,300, and Dell’s XPS 13 starts at $1230. You can save a ton of money, but neither of them don’t have vPro, or TPM like the ThinkPad.

Lenovo’s 2015 Carbon comes with a three-year warranty. This is more than great, and it can put your mind at peace when considering the long-term investment.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Verdict

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an impressive laptop and it shines in every area. Yet, it gets beaten by competitors in almost every department. It’s aimed at businesses but it also offers a commercial appeal. Unfortunately, business use is on the top of its priority lists.

It’s as thin as you get them, and it won’t strain your back even though it’s slightly bulkier than the MacBook Pro or the Dell XPS 13. The screen is sharp, with vibrant colors. Everything looks superb on the laptop’s display, but visually, Apple’s machine betters the ThinkPad.

The X1 Carbon outperforms the XPS, but it’s a ton slower than Apple’s MacBook Pro. Also, Lenovo, although it has a great battery life, considering all things, it gets bested by Dell and Apple.

If you’re in need of a consumer laptop, then you should definitely go for an Apple or Dell machine. Lenovo’s ThinkPad is best used for business. Its strengths lie in the vPro, the fingerprint reader, TPM, the more than generous huge three-year warranty and access to all of its internals.

Because it’s business oriented, you’ll have to pay more. Is it worth the trade-offs? It’s a pretty great business Ultrabook, but going over the $2,000 mark seems a little bit of an overkill for what it has to offer. The laptop is consistently good, with no crashes encountered, and most importantly it doesn’t creak or squeak. Build material is top notch.

Bottomline is – looking for a business machine? Take the Lenovo. Looking for a consumer machine? Pick an Apple or Dell laptop.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Price – Between $1,900 and $2,650.

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Intel backs Lenovo’s ThinkPad P50, and P70 with Skylake

August 11, 2015 By Roxanne Briean Leave a Comment

Lenovo unveiles ThinkPad P50, and P70 workstations laptops, and they surely aren’t your run of the mill mobile machines. Lenovo combines Skylake, Intel’s A-class Xeon processors, for the first time in their history, with 64 GB of RAM, 1 TB of SDD storage, and not one, but two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Lenovo notes that their ThinkPad P50, and P70 workstations are the only mobile machines that come with this much RAM.

A first for Intel is the fact that they are incorporating their Xeon processors into a mobile machine. Skylake, which uses the exact same 14 nm processes as its older sibling, the Broadwell product-line, features a much improved architecture, Intel notes.

The ThinkPad P50, and P70 are, simply put, behemoths of the industry, and they come as a refreshing statement that users don’t always look for the slimmest, or the most lightweight laptop. Not everyone wants to chomp on performance, just so the laptop can easily fit in that LV bag.

The 15.6-inch ThinkPad P50 weighs 5.6 pounds, and the 17-inch ThinkPad P70 stands at 7.6 pounds. Both of them clearly outweigh the 2 pound 12-inch MacBook.

They are meatier, they are driven by the fact that users require performance, not shallow machines to showcase in a Starbucks on the weekends. These ThinkPads are aimed to achieve a hardcore productivity status.

The ThinkPad P50 will retail at $1,599, while the ThinkPad P70 will be sold at $1,999. Buyers will have the option of choosing their preferred OS from a list comprised of Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and Ubuntu. Customers will also have the option of implementing a touch display, or a 4K display – at additional cost, of course.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad-product line will be available for purchase in Q4 of this year. The ThinkPad P70 will be equipped with a forgotten feature for most desktop users – it will come packed with a DVD-RW drive.

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Lenovo Announces a New Projector Smartphone

May 28, 2015 By Nancy Young Leave a Comment

Projector phones aren’t that new – even Samsung had their failed releases; but what’s new is that Lenovo may have just struck gold with their beaming device.

Obligatory – Beam me up Scotty!

Now that I have managed to get that Star Trek reference out of my system, let’s talk about the Lenovo smartphone that can beam almost anything!

Smart Cast was just announced at the Lenovo Tech World conference, and the internet has already gone crazy over it – and for good reasons too! It doesn’t feature the DLP technology that pico projectors use, and in its stead it sports an integrated focus-free laser projector – for the first time on a smartphone too.

It has all the features that a normal smartphone would have, so there’s no need to worry that you won’t be able to play that sweet Candy Crush Saga, or Clash of Clans – barf!

The Lenovo Smart Cast can project a virtual keyboard, or a set of piano keys – how about Fruit Ninja?! Yes, sir!

That’s fantastic, but let’s not get too excited. We don’t really know any technical specifications, and we seriously don’t know what it’s going to be priced at. The only info we’ve got comes from this short video. This short and awesome video. I just love it!

I don’t want to get all that pumped up, but how couldn’t I after watching the promo clip?

Let’s get our feet back on the ground. When Samsung released that meh Galaxy Beam 2 it was priced at $560, and it was a complete disappointment – remember me to not trust Samsung ever again. We’re looking at something along that price range. I’ll be more than happy if Lenovo prices it at $600, heck, even at $700, just don’t cut down on performance.

The gesture based control system will let the device’s user

The built-in kick-stand transforms any possible surface into a smart display so get ready for those lazy Sundays!

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Lenovo Unveils New ThinkPad Laptops and ThinkPad Stack System at CES 2015

January 5, 2015 By Deborah Campbell Leave a Comment

The International CES 2015 trade show hasn’t even officially started and companies have begun releasing information about new lines. The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015 is going to commence tomorrow, 5 January, in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. This year’s CES will be showcasing more than 3,500 exhibitors (suppliers, developers and manufacturers of consumer tech hardware and content) and around 160,000 people from more than 140 countries are expected to attend.

Lenovo couldn’t wait any longer and unveiled eight new ThinkPad laptops and a ThinkPad Stack System that is going to generate quite a commotion, we believe. Let’s take a look at those ThinkPads and the ThinkPad Stack System!

Before we begin, we would like to announce one of the most important changes that Lenovo made to their ThinkPad 2015 laptop line: the physical function keys are back! Last year, Lenovo replaced the physical buttons with an adaptive panel with touch-sensitive buttons and the users weren’t at all happy with that. Also, the touchpad sees the return of two right and left clickers.

Lenovo ThinkPad Laptops

The new Lenovo ThinkPad line has two Ultrabooks that are the company’s flagship products and they are both getting updated for the New Year. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a portable 14-inch laptop that has a high-resolution touch screen (optional feature, naturally) with a light but rigged case that weighs just 2.9 pounds. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon starts at $1,249 and will be available for purchase later this month.

The other flagship Lenovo laptop that the company unveiled at the CES 2015 is the Lenovo ThinkPad X250, a 12.5-inch laptop that weighs just 2.8 pounds and is only 0.8 inches thick. This laptop works with Lenovo’s Power Bridge technology which is a dual battery system that allows the user to configure the laptop for traveling for maximum battery life but also lowest weight. The Lenovo ThinkPad X250 starts at $1,149 and will be available for purchase starting February 2015.

The Lenovo ThinkPad 450 series has three new laptops: the Lenovo T450s, the Lenovo T450 and the Lenovo L450. The Lenovo ThinkPad T450s has a 14-inch display, weighs only 3.5 pounds and is 0.83 inches thick. It is compatible with Lenovo’s Power Bridge that can extend battery life when one needs it. The price starts at $1,099.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T450 also has a 14-inch display, but it is a bit heavier than the T450s model: it weighs 4 pounds and is 0.88 inches thick. The price stars at $849.

The Lenovo ThinkPad L 450 laptop has a 14-inch display that does not have a touch screen option, like all the other in the 450 line do. It’s also the heaviest and thickest: 4.25 pounds and 0.96 inches thick. The price starts at $699. All three Lenovo ThinkPad 450 series laptops will be available starting February 2015.

Lenovo also thought of those folks who prefer larger displays on their laptops when it created the new Lenovo T550. You can choose from two sizes: you can either get a 15.6-inch display or a 15.5-inch display with the high resolution of 2880×1620. The T550 comes with a RAM memory of up to 16GB, up to 1TB of HDD or 512GB of SSD and features all the ports and jack one needs to turn it into a desktop replacement. It weighs 5 pounds and is 0.88 inches thick. The Lenovo T550 will be available in February 2015 and the price starts at $999.

The Lenovo E ThinkPad line has two brand-new laptops: the Lenovo ThinkPad E550 and the Lenovo ThinkPad E450. The E550 has a 15.6-inch display, weighs 5.2 pounds, is 0.94 inches thick and starts at $599. The E450 has a 14-inch display, weighs 4 pounds, is 0.87 inches thick and starts at $599. Neither of the E laptops are available with a touch screen, but they do have optional optical drives. The internal storage for both laptops can be configured up to 1TB of HDD or 128GB of SSD. Both laptops will be available for purchase in February 2015.

Lenovo ThinkPad Stack System

Lenovo also launched a new and exciting ThinkPad Stack System, an accessory system line compatible with their ThinkPad laptop line. This system is designed to help you be more organized and get rid of any desk clutter. But there is a trick to them! What separates these accessories from the classic docks and external drives is the fact that the new Lenovo ThinkPad Stack accessories are stackable! That’s right, you can stack them on top of each other to achieve the neatest desk on the block.

This new innovative, albeit weird-looking system isn’t just a pretty way to stack things, because the devices connect to each other, while stacked, eliminating cabling. Get all four devices, stack them on top of each other and only use one single cable or just get one or two, they work perfectly as a team, as well as individual devices.

Here are the four ThinkPad Stack modules that Lenovo unveiled at CES 2015, available starting April 2015:

Bluetooth Speaker. It costs $89.99 and it is meant for audio and conference call handling. 3.5 mm micro USB.
Power Bank. This device costs $49.99, has dual USB, microUSB and 10,000 mAH.
HDD. This HDD costs $199.99 and features 1TB of internal memory, USB 3.0 and password security.
Access Point. This one also costs $199.99 and it is a LTE data hotspot.

Lenovo is taking a big chance with these four devices, mainly because they’re quite strange-looking and secondly, because their stackability is something that the users need to grow accustomed to. Whether this whole system will take off, we don’t know, but we’re betting a lot of people are going to try it!

Are any of these ThinkPad Laptops or devices from the ThinkPad Stack System seem appealing to you? Drop us a line in the comment section below and share your thoughts with us.