Less expensive ThinkPad notebooks are geared toward businesses with fewer than 100 employees and limited IT staffs.
Lenovo is looking to roll out a low-cost line of ThinkPad notebooks later this year that will compete against the Dell Vostro line and perhaps even its own 3000 series.
Lenovo on June 23 confirmed it will launch a new ThinkPad series called SL about the time that Intel plans to roll out its updated Centrino line. Intel announced it would push back its Centrino 2 launch until the summer, which forced some vendors to delay the launches of new PCs.
The fact that Lenovo is offering a real ThinkPad alternative is a real boon for companies that have to watch budgets and have limited or no IT staffs but still have a call for a sturdy, business-class laptop. While Dell has been adding to its line of Vostro PCs, including new notebooks and desktops, these PCs do not carry the same recognition as the well-known ThinkPad name.
This new ThinkPad SL line will offer new notebooks with screens ranging from 13.3 inches to 15.4 inches and prices ranging from $699 on the low end to $1,199 for higher-end models. Lenovo will bypass the proprietary docking station in favor of a more simple USB dock.
What About 3000?
The question for Lenovo is: What are its plans for the rest of its PC lineup?
The company launched its 3000 line a few years ago as its answer to the growing importance of small and midsize businesses, especially in the United States, but there has not been a lot of new there as of late.
On the far end of the spectrum, there has been speculation that Lenovo will kill the 3000 line and roll some of the features into the more consumer-oriented IdeaPad line that the company launched at the start of the 2008 CES expo in January.
Lenovo is apparently still thinking about those questions, and a spokesperson for the company did not respond to an e-mail seeking additional comment about the new ThinkPad SL line.
There’s also a question of what will happen to the ThinkPad R series if Lenovo offers the SL line for midmarket businesses and some SMBs.
The R series offers several ThinkPad laptops with relatively modest prices—the ThinkPad R61e with a 15.4-inch screen and an Intel Celeron processor (1.86GHz) starts at about $700, according to Lenovo’s Web site—while the T, X and tablet notebooks are geared toward the high end of the market and the company’s traditional enterprise customers.
The good news for customers is that Lenovo, even as it figures out its branding scheme, is seriously looking to enter the midmarket and the SMB space and will bring the legacy of the ThinkPad with it into an increasingly crowded field that includes Dell as well as Hewlett-Packard, which remains the top producer of PCs, according to Gartner and IDC.
