I'm Just Being Manan

Finally! Regional branches of international companies are now reaching out to the blogging community to show their products, interact with them & take feedback, which is huge as far as the Indian blogging scene is concerned. After Nokia’s N97 rather successful(?) attempt to connect with bloggers & use them as a medium to reach out to users, it’s Lenovo’s turn. And I’m rather glad that they’re doing this. Held in 2 cities – Delhi & Bombay it was a fun experience to sit in a room & interact with the decision makers, unlike press releases or announcements, there were a handful of bloggers which IMHO facilitates a lot more one-to-one interaction. We got an opportunity to talk with some really cool folks from Lenovo – Benjamin Myers, Arthur Yang, Anand Subramaniam among others. Here are images from the meet.

The discussion started with a brief on Lenovo’s upcoming range of products & how they’re focusing towards All-in-one PCs for the future & they’re offerings sure do look good. On display were a range of notebooks, netbooks & 2 All-in-ones. The A600 is their key product for the season, there was just one cord coming out of the unit which was the power cord & it had a remote. The remote is no ordinary remote. It lets you actually be remote. It connects remotely using bluetooth. And:

• doubles as a VOIP handset, allowing you to roam around the house & talk;
• triples as an air-mouse;
• quadruples as a Wii remote to let you play bundled games!

The A600 came with a built-in TV tuner card and is priced at ~70k INR (retail Croma). Images:

The more economical model – C300 has a display that I personally find more attractive compared to that of the A600 but it lacks a TV tuner and is priced ~45k INR. Images:

Another machine that caught my attention was the IdeaPad U350, the notebook was slim. Dubbed as the ‘Premium Notebook’ it has a LED backlight screen, weight of 1.6kg, thickest part of 1”. The notebook sure looked good if you’re not the netbook kind & need a full-blown proper laptop to carry around. I liked the minimalistic yet elegant design on the cover. This is a notebook that I will certainly recommend to people who have a daily travel schedule. Images:

The netbook range looked attractive but ever since I’ve used dad’s HP notebook & shifted to my Dell XPS16 I have a belief that back-lit keyboards need to become industry standard & lack thereof is something I’m not going to buy. So till netbooks start coming with back-lit keyboards I can’t be working on those tiny screens that’ll potentially make me blind. The other discussion on netbooks was of 3-cell or 6-cell. I personally feel that if you’re giving me something that’s portable, I’d rather have a longer life battery, enough for at least 6-7 hours. On display were the IdeaPad S10 series. Image:

If you notice that some Lenovo computers have some hint of orange, a line going through either the edges, on the keyboard. I asked whether there was any significance to the color orange & I was not surprised that there is. All of Lenovo’s offerings towards home-users will have this orange streak, for them the color stands for energy & complements as a vibrant life. Orange is in terms, Lenovo’s color much like red is Coke’s. The products on display were:

• Lenovo IdeaPad Y450, Y550 & Y650
• Lenovo G550 & G430 (Value notebooks)

We were given press material with snaps, spec sheets & a disc containing soft-copies of the spec sheets & images of the products. I loved the part where we were offered pizzas, hot chocolate & soft drinks.

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