Lenovo Enters U.S. Consumer Notebook Market with IdeaPad Line

Thursday saw Lenovo finally making an official appearance in the consumer notebook market in the United States. Lenovo is offering three products to those in the American public willing to spend more for notebooks that have more entertainment features than the standard ones in the market.

The United States market’s familiarity with the Lenovo name was so long limited to its business notebook – the ThinkPad. Branded the IdeaPad, the three new Lenovo notebooks in question – Y510, Y710, and U110 – have Intel’s dual core Centrino mobile platform. IdeaPad is slated to be the consumer aspect of the mobile PC operations of Lenovo.

Other features available on these three Lenovo consumer notebooks include face recognition technology along with a 1.3 megapixel embedded camera, five home theater speakers from Dolby, combo drives that enable recording of CDs/DVDs, Wi-Fi support, frameless screens, touch sensitive control surfaces, and outer cases that are textured.

These are not the first consumer notebooks from Lenovo to hit the American market. In October last year, the company introduced, without much fuss, the L3000 Y410, all of 14-inches and priced below $740 in some stores.

The base model of the L3000 Y410 had strong features, including a processor from the Pentium stable – the 1.46-GHz Dual Core T2310, 160 GB hard drive, memory worth 1Gb, CD/DVD recording drive, Wi-Fi support, 1.3 megapixel camera and Dolby home theater speakers with a subwoofer. However, Lenovo said it was not a new product and was based on existing models.

The three latest Lenovo notebooks are not based on any existing products and have been positioned to compete with the Pavilion notebooks from Hewlett-Packard and the XPS line from Dell.

Lenovo is quite upbeat about its new notebook offerings, and are looking to the features like VeriFace Face Recognition software and the home theater system from Dolby to give them an edge over rival products in the market. The VP of Lenovo’s global consumer marketing arm, Craig Merrigan, said the Lenovo screens looked “very smooth, sleek, and clean.”

In tandem with the camera, the face recognition software makes passwords redundant when it comes to logging in, as it recognizes the user’s face as the password. The Dolby home theater system too is chic, with four speakers on top of the notebook and a sub-woofer underneath.

The US is not the only country where Lenovo is launching its IdeaPad line of products. Other countries where these are being launched include India, France, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and the Philippines.

More and more, design has come to be a critical and integral aspect of the PC to consumers, especially as it makes the transition from a device for business to a device for entertainment. This is especially the case with notebooks, as people carry them around, be it to a business meeting or a coffee shop.