KEY POINTS:
There has been a fair bit of buzz this week around Lenovo's release of the X300 the Thinkpad that's almost as thin as its rival, the MacBook Air.
But scrolling through the local press release about the X300's release nearly made my eyes water as I came to the recommended retail price: "The ThinkPad X300 notebook starts at approximately NZD $4,199.00 (excl GST)". So much for that cut-price Chinese craftsmanship. You're not going to get much change out of five grand for this baby. And I thought the MacBook Air was overpriced at $2999.
What makes it worse is that the X300's starting price in the US is US$2,458 which with our soaring dollar equates to $3012. That's around $1500 less than what is being asked for it here. I think Lenovo will probably sell around seven of these things in New Zealand at the price it has set. If you like the look at it, get someone in the US to head down to Fry's Electrical and pick one up for you and ship it over.
The local pricing is a shame, because properly priced, Lenovo could really clean up in the small and medium business notebook segment here where people increasingly want lightweight devices they can take on their travels but don't want to sacrifice too much on functionality.
Where Lenovo has really excelled is in the X300's connectivity options getting WLAN, built-in mobile broadband (WWAN) and gigabit Ethernet in there and in managing to squeeze an optical drive into it. But I'm dubious about the reliance on the 64GB solid-state drive. There are people who will just need more storage so big the everyday software packages we use have become.
I'll hopefully be getting my hands on an X300 in the next couple of weeks so will give it a decent test drive.
What I have been test-driving this week is Google Sites (sites.google.com), the latest free online web service in the Google stable. It's aimed at collaborative online work between employees in an organisation. I'm interested in it because I've been looking for something with a nice interface that will allow me to access often-used files quickly from anywhere in the world and let other people log in to download files, view calendar entries and notes on projects, that type of thing.
Google sites hasn't had great reviews and I tend to agree given the development time put into this you'd think Google would have come up with something slicker. But its a useful tool nevertheless. You currently have to be running a web domain to use it but then giving access to employees is as easy as letting everyone else with an email on that domain who has registered for the service have access. Conversely, you can limit access to certain team members or open the whole site up to the public.
I don't think Microsoft's Sharepoint is in danger from being overrun by Google at this point given the current status of Google Sites, but there's heaps of potential in this whole area of collaborative working and wiki-style interactive among teams.
Finally, anyone who has spent time in San Francisco and seen the extent of the homelessness will appreciate Google's move to give every homeless person in the city a free phone number and voicemail for life.
I've often though as I've passed the street dwellers of that city how they keep in touch - I've never seen one with a cell phone. At least now they can dial in toll-free to pick up messages from health or employment services, friends and whatever family may still be in touch with them.
