May 2 - 5:55pm EDT   Lenovo is taking a jab at Apple's MacBook Air with a commercial for the company's new ThinkPad X300 ultraportable. The ad, posted on YouTube, shows the MacBook Air sliding out of its infamous document envelope, while the anonymous hands fumble with connecting a USB hub, several accessories – including the USB Superdrive – before cramming the computer and previously mentioned accessories back into the envelope, tearing it. [full story]

April 29 - 11:35am EDT   Lenovo today held its last IdeaPad unveiling for the US this season with the formal launch of the IdeaPad U110. The final version of the PC announced in January is now billed as a crossover ultraportable designed equally for fashionable users as well as serious travelers. Externally, the 11-inch system has a textured metal shell that recalls Lenovo's "Cloud of Promise" Olympic theme and is one of Lenovo's most compact systems yet, weighing under 2.5 pounds and measuring between 0.7 and 0.9 inches thick. [full story]

April 28 - 4:35pm EDT   Late last week, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer said the software giant will stop distribution and all support of its Windows XP operating systems by June 30. Lenovo is the latest computer company to announce it will offer XP past the deadline, thanks to Microsoft's own downgrade rights for its hardware-intensive Vista Business and Vista Ultimate editions. Customers with qualified Lenovo PCs with the two Vista editions can purchase a Windows XP recovery CD until January 31, 2009. [full story]

April 21 - 11:20am EDT   Lenovo today signaled a change in its philosophy by pulling the last notebook in its signature T series with a standard ratio display from its lineup. The PC builder has withdrawn the 4:3 ratio, 14-inch ThinkPad T61 from its store and now offers all its mid-size notebooks, including the 3000 and IdeaPad series, only in a widescreen ratio. Lenovo hasn't explained the decision but is considered one of the few computer vendors in North America to continue selling standard-ratio designs. [full story]

April 16 - 4:30pm EDT   PC shipments in the first quarter of 2008 reveal a changing landscape both in the US and in the world at large, according to preliminary results released today by IDC. While positions remain largely the same, shifts in growth percentages reveal that some companies are gaining at the expense of others. Dell in particular has recovered from its long slump in 2007 and has had a second consecutive quarter of strong shipments, leading US charts with 30.9 percent of the country's computer market (4.9 million units) and a 15.6 percent boost to shipments over the same period a year before. [full story]

April 15 - 1:40pm EDT   The U110, a 11.1-inch ultraportable notebook by China's Lenovo, has finally had more information disclosed on its specifications. The computer has appeared at the American online retailer J&R, in black and red versions; each edition is equipped with a low-voltage 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo processor and no optical drive, but does come with 3GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive. Additionally, users have access to Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, and 802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi. [full story]

April 11 - 11:30am EDT   Lenovo's ThinkPad X300 is just the first wave of a new line of ultra-thin notebooks at the company, says an apparent leak from Gizmodo. Timed to coincide with the launch of Intel's low-power Centrino 2 platform and processors in September, the line will scale down to a 12-inch X200 but will also move upwards to a 14-inch X400 and even a 15.4-inch X500, supplying a similar case thickness but at the user's choice of screen size. [full story]

April 4 - 12:05pm EDT   The Lenovo Group sold its handset unit on March 31, the company announced on Thursday. The sale, valued at $100 million in January, was approved by Lenovo's shareholders on March 17. In January, executives decided that the world's fourth-largest PC manufacturer should focus on its core business. The buyer is believed to be an unnamed group of investors. [full story]

April 2 - 11:10am EDT   Lenovo today with Intel's help confirmed that it will be one of the first companies to produce a Mobile Internet Device (MID) based on Intel's Atom processor with a new all-in-one device. The IdeaPad U8 will serve as a hybrid communicator and media player and will pack multiple control schemes to match: users can tap a 5-inch touchscreen to navigate menus, browse the web via Firefox, or other complex functions, but also use a unique optical joystick that substitutes as a mouse pointer and lets an owner steer the device with one hand. [full story]

March 26 - 4:10pm EDT   Dell and multiple other top-tier PC makers today said they were facing the extended effects of a shortage of notebook batteries. Following a fire earlier this month at an LG Chem factory, Dell has encouraged it to boost prices of additional lithium-ion battery packs in an effort to preserve their reduced supply. There were no immediate plans to raise prices for regular systems, though the company would prefer not to offer a definitive statement, according to spokesman Jess Blackburn. [full story]

March 24 - 2:25pm EDT   Seagate may pull a lawsuit as its trump card if solid-state drives (SSDs) threaten to undermine its conventional hard drive business, company head Bill Watkins has said in a new interview with Fortune. The executive alleges that both Intel and Samsung are violating patents dealing with the interaction between computers and storage and that a formal complaint could follow that would either force them to change their technology or else compensate Seagate for their purported infringement. [full story]

March 24 - 9:45am EDT   Lenovo this morning helped kick off the Olympic torch run with its first international edition notebook commemorating the trip to Beijing. The Olympic 3000-series V200 adds the company's "Cloud of Promise" design previously shown only for China to the company's home-oriented 12-inch portable, adding red with silver clouds to the normally black design. Specifications are unavailable should fit in line with one of the stock V200 models, which starts out with a 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB of memory, and a 160GB hard drive. [full story]

March 21 - 11:55am EDT   Dell's Latitude E4000 series will more explicitly target the same very thin, advanced technology field covered by Apple's MacBook Air and Lenovo's ThinkPad X300, according to leaks continued today by Engadget. While both the E4200 and E4300 will offer thinner LED-backlit, 12-inch displays, the E4200 will be far thinner than earlier Latitudes and will measure between 0.6 and 0.8 inches thick and will optimally weigh just 2.2 versus the 3 of its challengers. This will in part come from its storage: the E4200 will require either a 32GB or 64GB solid-state drive instead of a conventional hard disk. [full story]

March 19 - 10:55am EDT   Dell today denied claims that its solid-state drives were experiencing unusually high failure rates. Although it had not been directly linked to the problem by the Avian Securities analysis and instead had been the implied subject only in follow-up journalist reports, the company has effectively admitted that it was the subject of Avian's research but now claims that the analysis was fundamentally flawed, taking no input from Dell itself. [full story]

March 18 - 11:15am EDT   At least one major computer manufacturer is encountering an unusually high rate of failure among notebooks equipped with solid-state drives (SSDs), according to a report by analyst group Avian Securities. Declining to name the company in question, manager Avi Cohen of the research firm claims that a major PC manufacturer is seeing returns of at least 20 percent and as much as 30 percent of the SSD systems it sells. Most of these, or up to 20 percent, are from drives which failed outright, though Cohen doesn't say whether this stems from the storage itself or the controller chip, which manages data transfers between the SSD and its host computer. [full story]