What's that crunching noise? Lenovo running over rivals' bones Unstoppable Chinese juggernaut Lenovo hit the gas pedal hard in the final three months of fiscal 2014, resulting in double digit sales and profit hikes for the quarter and the year. Meanwhile, its rivals continue to run down on empty, as they struggle to find a way to offset declining PC sales with tabs and smartphones that …
Is the G a smartphone? That's how little I know, though my recollections of Motorola were not positive and I'm hard pressed to regard that acquisition as an actual asset...
However, what I was actually looking for in this article is new evidence about the profitability of their smartphones. In the last report I read on that topic, only Apple, Samsung, and Huawei were actually claiming profits on their smartphone sales. Is Lenovo in the black, too? Based on this story, it seems possible, though I still regard it as unlikely... More likely they'd be trading off profits for market share, at least for now.
They also made my Thinkpad Tablet which sported a locked bootloader and is thus restricted to Android 4.0.3 and isn't upgradeable to Cyanogen because of this Secureboot malarkey. Lenovo refuses to hand over the keys to this somewhat obsolete hardware.
Oh, and the microUSB port is prone to failure due to poor construction. As it's the only (reasonable) way to charge the tablet it looks definitely like this was my last Lenovo mobile product for a looong time.
Same sort of story here, but with a Lenovo laptop. First getting into BIOS or UEFI or whatever requires turning the computer off and pressing a separate power button than the main one, and they don't tell you this in any documentation, I also never managed to get it to boot from USB, in theory it can (I think), but I couldn't figure it out. At least you can launch the Windows 7 installer from the USB drive while Windows 8 is running.
Second, the way the Windows 8 partition table was set up was very, very strange. Four partitions, two with data, One with Windows and the other with the Drivers, which was handy when I upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows 8, good thing I didn't erase that partition, it saved me about an hour.
The weird part was that there were also what seemed to be two partitions that existed on the disk which were seemingly empty but still existed for some stupid or nefarious reason. I have no idea if this is par for the course with them, but I don't seem to recall my old IBM Thinkpad doing that and my Vaio aside from its weirdness (you had to use the Sony drivers, even for commodity parts like the GPU, or else all kinds of weird shit would happen) sure as hell didn't.
Given the hassle to get my computer working the way I want it to, I'm going to think long and hard about buying from them again.
We tend to look for the best value laptops and desktops, which in the past have tended to be Acer, HP or Lenovo. Recently virtually all our purchases have been Lenovo on the lower end or Apple on the high end. The Lenovo desktops are good value and have been very reliable; the non-SFF ones come with a useful carrying handle! Apart from one model some years ago (TPEdge E520), the Lenovo lower end laptops have also been reliable, though the trackpads and keyboards on some of them don't have a very nice feel to them. They also don't tend to have excessive bloatware installed. Some of the Lenovo products such as the Yoga (both Android and Windows) are very innovative, which is a refreshing change from PC manufacturers (apart from Apple).
My grouse with Lenovo is that they did not make the Windows 7 touchpad drivers available for their N500 model, so I'm lumbered with HAVING to carry around a USB Mouse *&* a spare battery for it!
Added to that, I got this model secondhand in Hong Kong from a non-techie user who couldn't get it to switch on.... I just removed one of the two RAM strips & it has booted up ever since.
Fitting a second RAM strip again caused it to fail to boot up until removed!
I now run with a single 2 GB RAM strip 'cos the Lenovo Service Dept in HK couldn't offer any solution that was co$t effective - or supply a Win 7 driver for the touchpad. <Grrrrrh!!!>
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