Lenovo ThinkPad X130e preview; a rugged notebook for classrooms

Lenovo ThinkPad X130e, a special rugged notebook for students is slated for official release mid this month. The rugged classroom upgrade to Lenovo ThinkPad X120e has several striking features. Though not looking like a highly rugged and hard notebook, ThinkPad X130e will be a better pick for classrooms.

Students can handle the system in classrooms for some rough uses with no fear of harms with mild falls, shocks and impacts, reports say. The notebook is made using a rubber bumper circling its plastic chassis along with a slim bezel protected by 1.2mm thick plastic. Lenovo will sell the notebook for $469 once it lands in stores on December 20.

Lenovo ThinkPad X130e tech specs
Dimensions: The Lenovo rugged notebook is to come with 11.55 inch width and 8.5-inch height.

Weight: The rugged notebook will have a weight of 3.9 pounds (1.78kg). Compared with many newly arrived Ultrabooks, 3.9 pounds is quite attractive, especially being a rugged system.

Display: The Lenovo notebook will have an 11.6-inch LED display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. It makes the device a big threat to Apple MacBook Air 11-inch. Moreover, for students, 11-inch display is enough. It makes them handle the device comfortably and carry with less effort.

Processor: The notebook comes up with two processor options; an Intel Core i3-2367M processor or AMD Fusion E-300 and E-450 APUs. You can choose between the processors from Intel and AMD.

RAM: 2GB of RAM. It can be upgraded up to 8GB, however.

Storage: The device offers 5GB of internal storage.

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7.

Battery: The Lenovo laptop mounts a 6-cell battery that can run the device for 8.5 hours on a single recharge.

Connectivity: It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0 for connectivity with the network.

Ports: HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, 4-in-1 memory card reader and three USB 2.0 ports are with the Lenovo notebook.

Others: The notebook features Lenovo’s RapidBoot technology to quickly boot up the device. As a result, only 20 odd seconds are required to boot the notebook.

What things to make it special?

Rugged notebook for students: There are lots of rugged notebooks in stores. But Lenovo ThinkPad X130e remains different being a special rugged notebook for the student community. Students can carry the device in their backpacks with no fear of harms from impacts and shocks. Even some rough use of the device in the classroom will not damage the notebook.

RapidBoot technology: ThinkPad X130e is to come up with Lenovo’s RapidBoot technology for instant boosting. Thanks to the feature, you just have to wait only 20 seconds to get ThinkPad X130e boot up.

11-inch LCD display: The Lenovo notebook will have a small 11-inch LED display with high definition. You can watch contents with better clarity in the display.

Drawbacks
Lenovo will unveil the notebook late this month only. So it is not possible to count drawbacks of the device for the time being.

Price and availability
Lenovo is to sell ThinkPad X130e for a price starting from $469. It will appear in shelves from 20th December, 2011.

What others say?
Dilip Bhatia, vice president, ThinkPad Business Unit, Lenovo exposes why the company went on to roll out a rugged notebook for students in its ThinkPad X130e series.

“At Lenovo ThinkTank 2011 we brought hundreds of distinguished educators together, and the resounding feature CIOs told us that ranks highest on their list of features important for PC purchases is ‘ruggedness’,”

Let us see what Paige Johnson, education strategist of Intel says of the upcoming Lenovo ThinkPad X130e,

“Having a purpose-built device designed to improve learning for students is a critical foundation for education transformation. Lenovo’s ThinkPad X130e laptop powered by Intel Core i3 processors provides the capability and functions that students need for a 21st Century education.”

Wrap-up
Lenovo has been one of chief notebook and tablet makers in the world. The Chinese technology maker always brings incredibly innovative products. Its ThinkPad and IdeaPad notebook series have largely attained popularity in global markets. Indeed, the company is now coming up with a new rugged model of ThinkPad to entice customers from student communities.'

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Ivy Bridge to Bring Saner Security, Lower Power to Intel CPU Line

Intel’s Ivy Bridge mobile lineup has been leaked, and the leak confirms that the upcoming launch of Intel’s 22nm, low-power chips will mark a major shift in the chipmaker’s strategy on two important fronts: 1) the ultrabook is being held up as the new default form factor for laptops, and 2) Intel appears to be abandoning its (insane) segmentation of chips based on security features, at least when it comes to mobile.
ThinkPad Laptop battery

As Intel CEO Paul Otellini revealed in May, Intel is making its 17W ultra-low voltage (ULV) products the bedrock of its mobile line. Gone are the 25W laptop chips that formed the centerpiece of Intel’s mobile family, with the 17W ULV parts slotting in beneath them as more expensive, niche products. Instead, ULV takes center stage and becomes the new normal for laptops. (Note that VR Zone speculates as to why the 25W parts were killed off, but there’s no need to guess—again, Otellini made it clear that they were going away with Ivy Bridge.)

This shift to 17W is part of Intel’s larger emphasis on promoting the Macbook Air-like “ultrabook” form factor as the wave of the future. Intel has done a lot of engineering to produce the reference designs for these, engineering that it gives away to OEMs. The company is also doing a ton of ultrabook PR, which, again, is basically free advertising for its OEMs. All told, this adds up to a massive effort on the part of Intel to make the thinner ultrabook form-factor the new default for all PC laptops. Thicker laptops will still be out there, but they’ll be for users who want battery life above all else.

I got some hands-on time with a few ultrabook models at IDF 2011 in September, and given that I was toting an 11″ Macbook Air to the event, they did not impress. But if you’re used to a larger laptop, the ultrabook might get a rise out of you. Regardless, it’s great to see that notebooks are going to be slimming down across the board.

Security: from deranged to sensible

The second important implication of the leaked slides—and this was not something that was pre-announced by Intel—is that the chipmaker is moving away from its deranged and irresponsible segmentation of chips by security and manageability features.

In the past, features like vPro, virtualization, and trusted execution technology (TXT) have been offered selectively on different parts of Intel’s lineup, so that users who pay more get more security and more functionality, and users who pay less get less. But given that Intel has been claiming security as the company’s top priority for over a year now, the idea of selling some chips that are less secure than others is complete insanity. Every chip that Intel sells should fully support every one of Intel’s security and remote manageability features, period. Anything else is derelict, and puts the lie to the claim that the security of the entire PC ecosystem is truly important at Intel.

What makes this worse is that this segmentation is totally artificial. These chips come off the production line supporting all of Intel’s features and extensions—it’s cheaper to manufacture them in bulk this way. Intel then blows sets of polysilicon fuses to shut down specific features in order to get the desired product segmentation. In other words, all of the chips come off the line supporting all of Intel’s security features, and then Intel cripples some of them so that it can sell the non-crippled ones for more money. Again, for a company that preaches so much about security, this practice is mind-bendingly irresponsible.

With Ivy Bridge’s mobile line, Intel appears to have seen the light, and is now offering all of its features and extensions across all of the mobile SKUs. Intel is now more sensibly segmenting the line by number of cores, number of threads, maximum CPU and GPU clockspeed, and L3 cache. This is what Intel should have been doing for the past five or six years, so we can be thankful that the company is finally walking the walk, instead of just talking the talk.

On a final note, Ivy Bridge will be Intel’s first line of CPUs to be based on the company’s brand new tri-gate transistor. This shift to tri-gate will give Intel CPUs a large, one-off increase in performance and/or power efficiency, so ultrabooks based on Ivy Bridge should get a non-trivial boost in battery life. How big this boost is depends on the notebook, and on whether its designers opted to improve on the form factor by shrinking the battery or to keep the form factor and battery the same.

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