Lenovo "Rips and Flips" the ThinkPad With New Convertible Helix Design

MojoKid writes "Convertible laptops and ultrabooks had a big presence this year with the release of Windows 8. At CES, Lenovo revealed its ThinkPad Helix which it marketed as having a 'groundbreaking "rip and flip" design' that enables this 11.6-inch ultrabook to transform into a powerful Windows 8 tablet with Intel vPro technology for the enterprise. The ThinkPad Helix lets you work in four different modes: laptop, tablet, stand, and tablet+. When attached to the Enhanced Keyboard Dock in laptop mode, you'll get additional battery life and additional ports as well as Lenovo's ThinkPad Precision keyboard, a five button trackpad that supports Windows 8 features, and a traditional ThinkPad TrackPoint. ... The ThinkPad Helix features an 11.6-inch Full HD 1080p IPS (In-Plane Switching) 10-point multi-touchscreen with pen touch input and Gorilla Glass for protection. Lenovo claims the ThinkPad Helix will run for up to 8 hours on a single charge. Performance-wise, the new ThinkPad tablet convertible doesn't have a ton of horsepower, but the machine will get by well enough handling light multimedia and office app use with relative ease." The "stand" mode is just the tablet part mounted away from the keyboard, tablet+ similarly just the tablet part folded over the dock giving it a longer battery life and more ports. It comes at a price though: ~$1800.

Comments

Is there really a market for tablet-laptop

[rsborg]

This sounded really cool about 10 years ago, but what real appeal does this have over laptop+tablet? What are the use cases where this kind of flexibility actually matters?

If I'm using a tablet I'm either on the road or at home - I never see a case for doing "tablet" style stuff at work. Considering "Thinkpad" is an enterprise brand, what need does this fill other than fulfilling Microsoft's desire to turn their Windows userbase into a tablet userbase?

I'll leave aside the fact that almost no one wants Windows8 for it's Metro interface (as witnessed by the Surface RT's spectacular sales failure).

Re:Is there really a market for tablet-laptop

[rsborg]

Having one device tends to be more convenient and often cheaper.

Not in this case - $1800 is more than a 11" macbook air + iPad (and those are the more expensive options for laptop+tablet).

Re:Is there really a market for tablet-laptop

[MachineShedFred]

The reason we're looking at this device at my business: saving on software licensing.

Yes, you can buy at T-series notebook and a tablet for about the same money, but you're buying two licenses of each software title now. Also, this device still checks all the boxes we were using X-series tablets for previously - namely signature capture with a stylus.

Oh, and they have Windows 7 support, so we don't even have to train our users on Windows 8 until Microsoft relents and gives us a sensible UI.

sarcastic reception

[wierd_w]

Ok, so if I take this, and then flip a coin between a desktop linux and Android for x86 platforms, I will end up with a tablet that might actually be useful?

Because seriously-- didn't microsoft learn its lesson yet about ambiguating the desktop and tablet market spaces with its metrosexual user interface? Are they *still* trying to blur that line? /half trolling

Lenovo, please unlock the bootloader

[martiniturbide]

I had been fighting with Lenovo for the last 100 days to unlock the bootloader of the Thinkpad Tablet 1.

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-slate-tablets/Thinkpad-Tablet-1-Errors-on-Recovery-Menu/td-p/1055573

The devices is prone to brick if the software (recovery menu) gets corrupted. And can not be recovered since Lenovo has the bootloader locked. The solution that Lenovo gives you is to replace the mainboard for a software error.

Lenovo Quality team told me that they can not release the bootloader keys because the Thinkpad Tablet has DRM software included.

Re:Lenovo, please unlock the bootloader

[WaywardGeek]

I'm writing this post on my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch ultrabook. The design is super cool. The company, Lenovo, sucks green greasy double jointed donkey dicks (I think that's how we insulted each other when I was 9). This is my third X1 Carbon Touch. I ordered it because I needed a touch screen Windows 8 machine with a SSD in January. That was the single biggest waste of my time related to any purchase in my life, other than having to refinance a house. The first Lenovo machine died the second day I had it. Of course, we had their best support and warranty, since we can't afford to sit on our hands for days while hardware gets fixed. So... 10 weeks later I got a replacement machine! It was dead on arrival, however. PC Connections saved my bacon and found a somewhat working PoS Lenovo X1 Carbon touch and got it to me, and that's what I'm still using. The wifi has to be reset about every two hours, and it does not come out of hibernation properly sometimes, so it feels a lot like running Linux, rather than Windows. I didn't think it was possible for a company to piss me off more than Dell has, but I was wrong.

Re:Lenovo, please unlock the bootloader

[Alomex]

So... 10 weeks later I got a replacement machine!

Lenovo ships every spare part by boat from China. This is a joke for machines such as Thinkpads which are meant for businesses.

It boggles the mind that their Chinese based operations can be so stupid as not to realize the damage they do to their brand every time this happens.

My last thinkpad was needed repairs just a few months after the two year warranty expired, then a year later one day it just died. That was my third thinkpad and the last one I ever buy.

$1800 !!!!!

[multiben]

Good luck with that.

Disable Advertising

[Russ1642]

I could have sworn I had advertising disabled.

Ding Ding Ding

[deanklear]

The real winner in the device market will be the first vendor to offer a tablet that connects to a laptop through a true HD interface to become a second screen and input device. People don't want everything in one device... computer sales are down because everyone has one.

Give us a laptop -- we like keyboards. Give us an iPad like device -- something to lend to a visitor or a kid, or to haul on to the couch, or for casual gaming. When we plug one into the other, pop up the hard drives so we can move data back and forth, or even use the free space on the tablet as an extra bit of scratch space. Allow the tablet to become a Cintiq-like input device for the laptop, and make sure the laptop has an additional video out for a larger 4k-ish screen.

But with all of the non-Apple vendors stuck with whatever horrible idea Ballmer's team of dunces "imagineers," we'll probably end up with a lot of stupid and unusable convertibles like this Lenovo thing.

Recently I was forced to work with Windows Server 2012. And you know, I never thought I'd say this, but I miss the simple stupidity of the Microsoft Bob era in Redmond. At least Bill Gates was smart enough to not touch servers with such an infantile interface.

"Oh, the database connection seems to be down, and you need to check running processes? We've removed the Start Button to speed up the process. Simply tilt the device to the right, swipe left, and choose the Unhappy Face. Then cycle through the server managers and click the undulating cube -- the red one, not the chartreuse (duh). Then hope and pray we keep the same method in Smiley Server 2015."

Re:Lenovo, stop destroying the ThinkPad Brand!

[Grishnakh]

I used to have ThinkPads, given to me by my employers. Now, for my personal use as I no longer have a work-issued laptop, I've ended up getting a Dell Latitude E6400 on Ebay, and I really like it. The keyboard is quite good for a notebook, and just as good as the T-series Thinkpad I used to have. The design is much more attractive, and it even uses real metal for much of the exterior, rather than plastic.

Unfortunately, your last line is correct: the successor to this, the E6410, was just as good (really only a slight update to use the Core i5/i7 CPUs instead of the Core2Duos), but after that they went to the E6420 and E6430, and they're shit. The E6420 changed to a crappy rounded shape, is much uglier, and there's a horrific looking orange trim ring around the keyboard for some insane reason. It looks ridiculous. The E6430 changed the butt-ugly orange ring to gray, but otherwise is pretty much identical, and still butt-ugly. Worse, these switched to the shitty wide-aspect-ratio screens, so you lose vertical pixels with these new "improved" models, as compared to the old ones (no, you don't get more horizontal pixels either); the whole change was really a cost-cutting move along with a move to "update" the aesthetics to make them ugly like everything else in the consumer space has become these days.

So if you want my recommendation, get a E6400 or E6410 (or their 15-inch brothers the E6500/E6510) on Ebay off-lease. They're dirt cheap, and there's tons of cheap parts available from vendors on there. Just be sure to get the higher-res screens, and unless the screen res isn't important to you, don't get anything from the official Dell refurbished seller on there ("delldirect" or something like that), because they never list the screen res. Avoid the newest models, though this seems to go for everything these days.