Last week, Lenovo announced a host of new products ahead of the ongoing IFA conference in Berlin, Germany. Prominent among the new offerings is the updated line of Yoga laptops, as well as a bunch of devices that sit at the intersection of the tablets/ smart displays market.
The new products are additions to Lenovo’s offerings for the consumer market, following the launch of products like the updated Lenovo X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga targeted at business users. At the sidelines of Lenovo’s Berlin launch event, Gadgets 360 had an opportunity to speak to Jerry Paradise, Vice President, Global Commercial Portfolio & Product Management at Lenovo to understand the trends in the corporate market.
“There’s more opportunities now for innovation than there ever was and I’ve been in this business for 27 years,” Paradise said. “I think that technology certainly [is] leveraging the connectedness of devices, where you will leverage the cloud and make devices smarter by pushing data up and the device becoming a bit more predictive.”
“It can actually be more useful to me because it’s pulling from a bigger cloud of data, and providing that better experience. So that’s where the trend is — what kind of data can we collect off the sensors on the device? How can we use that data to improve the overall experience?”
“Customers say, well, if you know what kind of applications I use, and you know [the kind of] hardware is in your machine, can you do things like tell me when I’m getting ready to blue screen? Maybe you know, the certain combination of applications and drivers. Can you tell me if it’s going to blue screen before it does? Yeah, maybe.”
“And so we’re looking at those kinds of technologies to say, I can tell with the combination of apps and drivers you have, and the state of your machine, move that to the cloud, and perhaps maybe we can create a better experience. So they’re asking it to be more predictive.”
Paradise then gave an example of how Lenovo is leveraging various technologies to enable some unique features.
“Our eye-tracking technology — using the IR camera, we can make the usability of moving around the screens better,” he said. “Another good example is some of the technology trends that are on security — using the IR camera looking for people looking over your shoulder.”
“Our ThinkPad PCs are actually are scanning for eyes, in the back, and if somebody looks over my shoulder, I can see you. We can detect it, we can tell you that there’s somebody from your shoulder.”
“So it’s becoming a little more predictive, it’s becoming a little more autonomous, and it’s giving you value that you didn’t have.”
With an increasing overlap between our personal and professional spaces, Paradise detailed how smartphones have helped shape requirements in the enterprise, specifically the rise of always-on, always-connected devices.
“I think that the cellphone has changed the expectation for how the PC works,” he said. “And we’re definitely seeing the requirement for always-on, always-connected, connected standby [PCs], and we want the apps to catch up with it, right with the hardware capability. But it’s in enterprises, you can imagine, the new environment, nobody has a desk, right? They want low battery [consumption], they want it when they’re walking around from desk to desk, when they’re hot seating, and they want their email to be updating.”
“That’s all part of that smart technology that we’re building in Lenovo, and we’re actually solving for those things. The customer[s] that I speak with, most of them are in some kind of transformation where they going into an open landscape. Nobody has a seat. So we’re trying to build the technologies into device, one of which being it’s always-on, always-connected.”
“If you look at our devices that we have today, we support connected standby through Wi-Fi, as well as WAN for LTE. So you can do always-on, always-connected on our PCs today. You close them down, you still get your email updates. So It’s a lot a lot of good technology that’s finding its away from the phones over to the PC.”
Disclosure: Lenovo sponsored the correspondent’s flights and hotel for IFA 2019 in Berlin.