Lenovo's ThinkPad T61 is one of several notebooks known to have an error-prone battery.
(Credit: CNET)Lenovo on Friday said it will replace batteries on several of its ThinkPad laptops that show error messages.
Some users are reporting batteries are displaying error messages that read "Irreparable damage" or "Battery cannot be charged," and others are reporting their battery runs only for a very short time or experiences a sudden drop in its fuel gauge. It's known to occur on these ThinkPad models: T60, T61, R60, R61, X60, and X61.
Though it does not pose a safety risk, and it is not a product recall, Lenovo said, it will give those affected a replacement battery.
Lenovo announced an internal overhaul Wednesday, reorganizing both its regional and product groups.
Think products, like the iconic ThinkPad and the desktop ThinkStation, will be separated from the Idea group, which makes the IdeaPad and IdeaCentre PCs. The Think group will focus on commercial customers as well as high-end small and medium businesses (SMB). The Idea group will target consumer and SMB transactional customers.
The reorganization also spawned two new business units: one that targets mature markets, and another that targets emerging markets. They will replace the current business units that focus on specific regions. Lenovo considers the U.S., Canada, Israel, Australia/New Zealand, and Western Europe mature, while Africa, Asia Pacific, China, Eastern Europe, India, Pakistan, Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and the Middle East are emerging.
The reorganization is the latest change at the Chinese company, which has been hit hard by the faltering global economy and resulting drop in IT spending. Lenovo lost $97 million last quarter--which resulted in the CEO stepping down, and the laying off of 11 percent of its workforce--due partly to the fact that it is so heavily invested in large commercial customers.
In an interview with CNET News last month, Lenovo COO Rory Read said the transactional business had slowed down more than expected, and that he hoped to grow the consumer business to more than the current 25 to 30 percent of sales it already accounts for.
Lenovo is apparently planning to unveil a ThinkPad notebook with a dual display.
As much as I'd love to post a photograph of a laptop with two screens, I cannot do so in good conscience. Several sites reporting on the laptop included photos that allegedly came from an IBM site that accidentally published on December 2. But none of those sites list the source of the photo. They also link back to the original IBM page, but a photograph of a laptop with two screens does not appear there.
The story was apparently first reported on NotebookReview.com on December 4. But no one paid much attention to that site's information until this week when a number of sites started following one another.
eWeek apparently got its hands on one of the ThinkPad W700ds laptops and posted in-house photos.
The information on an IBM site does confirm the dual screen's existence. According to that site, the main screen is 17 inches and the secondary screen is 10.6 inches. According to eWeek, the dual-screen setup is designed for "photographers, graphic artists, and application developers."
According to the IBM site, the second screen adds more than two pounds to the machine, bringing it up to 10.9 pounds and putting it in the category of a desktop replacement. Other stats from that site: it offers either an Intel Core 2 Quad Core or a Core 2 Dual Core, and it can be configured with a solid-state drive.
The notebook will make its official debut at the Consumer Electronics Show next month in Las Vegas, eWeek said.
Memory chipmakers are fighting for their life.
The memory chip market--and industry--is caught in a particularly brutal downward price spiral that is threatening the viability of even the largest players.
"Memory manufacturers who have already been losing money for several quarters are now looking at another six months to a year of absolutely ominous conditions," said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities.
Companies are now in survival mode, according to Cohen. "It is a matter of survival and everyone needs to figure out how to stay in business over the next year or how to scavenge something if one (company) decides it cannot survive," said Cohen.
Currently, two major memory chip manufacturers are seeking investment lifelines. Hynix, the world's second largest maker of memory, is trying to scare up cash by seeking buyers for a 36 percent stake in the company. So far, the only likely bidder to emerge is Samsung--which has also made a play for struggling SanDisk, the largest supplier of retail flash memory cards.
The other ailing memory maker is Qimonda AG--an Infineon Technologies subsidiary. Rumors have been rife that the manufacturing assets of the loss-ridden company will be snapped up.
All of this turmoil was underscored this week when Micron Technology, the largest U.S. maker of memory, announced that it had lost $1.6 billion in fiscal 2008.
"The DRAM business--it just doesn't feel like that, for many companies, it's sustainable," said Ron Foster, chief financial officer at Micron, speaking during the company's earnings conference call on Wednesday.
The average selling price for NAND and DRAM has dropped sharply since May.
(Credit: Micron Technology)Pricing has fallen off a cliff in the last few months, making a bad situation worse. Micron said Wednesday that the average selling prices of DRAM chips--the main memory used in PCs--was down between 15 percent and 20 percent from last quarter. NAND flash prices were down between 30 percent and 35 percent. (NAND flash is used as storage in portable music players, digital cameras, and the nascent solid-state drive market.)
The NAND price crash has forced Micron and Intel to delay the "build out" of manufacturing capacity in Singapore, which is part of their joint flash memory venture, IM Flash Technologies, Micron said Wednesday.
"Overall, the NAND market continues to be in an oversupply condition," said Micron's Foster.
This is affecting investment. "The capital expenditure for the NAND market in 2008 is going to be down sequentially (year-to-year), which is the first time that's happened since the inception of the market," said Steven Appleton, chairman and CEO of Micron on Wednesday.
The PC market has also turned bleak. "The PC business was plugging along pretty well and then all of sudden in the last months the demand profile has just really dropped off," according to Foster.
All these negatives add up to a cruel market that is forcing some companies to either merge or perish. "This is leading to a new wave of forced consolidations and partnerships. This industry will look very different a year from now with very few players controlling much larger market shares and with a much better ability to control production and pricing," said Cohen.
This consolidation is not only affecting manufacturers but players in the retail channel too. SanDisk--which does not manufacture flash chips but sources them from a Japan-based joint venture with Toshiba--has seen its stock price plunge more than $60 per share over the last two years. This has made it vulnerable. SanDisk's chairman and CEO, Eli Harari, said last month that the $26-a-share bid from Samsung was "opportunistically timed at the trough of an industry-wide downturn."
Not everything is doom and gloom. The market for solid-state drives--which use NAND flash--is poised to grow. Appleton cited the burgeoning netbook market as an opportunity for SSDs. The enterprise is a target market too: SSDs based on single-level cell (SLC) technology can offer many times the performance of hard disk drives for customers such as credit card companies and airlines.
Ultraportable laptops, such as the ThinkPad X301 and Dell Latitude E4200, are also beginning to use SSDs as a storage replacement for hard disk drives.
The price decline for solid-state drives over the last quarter makes these drives "more attractive from an end user's perspective," Micron said Wednesday, adding that "NAND far exceeds DRAM growth demand rates."
Intel has listed new low-power processors for upcoming ultra-portables from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Lenovo, among others.
The ThinkPad X301 uses a new ultralow voltage processor from Intel.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The chipmaker also listed its first mobile quad-core processor, the QX9300, which runs at 2.53GHz and comes with 12MB of level-2 cache. The processor is priced at $1,038.
The 45-nanometer low-power processors will go into ultra-portable notebooks like the new ThinkPad X301 announced this week, and HP 2530p also rolled out on Monday. The next version of the MacBook Air is also rumored to be using one of these chips.
The SL9400 and SL9300 processors have a thermal envelope of 17 watts, about one half the power envelope of mainstream Intel mobile processors rated at 35 watts. The SL9400 runs at 1.86GHz and is priced at $316. The SL9300 is clocked at 1.6GHz and priced at $284. Both chips have 6MB of cache memory.
Further down the power scale, the SU9400 and SU9300 are rated at only 10 watts and have clock speeds of 1.4GHz and 1.2GHz, respectively. The SU9400 is set at $289, while the SU9300 goes for $262. Both have 3MB of cache memory.
Intel also announced new mobile Celeron models. The mobile Celeron 585 has a core clock speed of 2.66GHz and is priced at $107. The 575 model runs at 2GHz and sells for $86.
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