Motorola Unveils Co-Branded Lenovo 'ThinkPhone' (theverge.com) 40
The Lenovo ThinkPhone by Motorola is being launched today in the U.S. for $699. It's the first co-branded phone from Motorola that arrives nine years after Lenovo purchased the Motorola brand for $2.91 billion. According to The Verge, the smartphone offers "a suite of productivity features designed to work with ThinkPad laptops." From the report: The ThinkPhone has a lot of the same stuff as a mainstream flagship phone, even though it's priced just below the likes of the $799 Samsung Galaxy S23. It comes with a big 6.6-inch 1080p OLED with up to 144Hz refresh rate. Build quality is quite sturdy with an aluminum frame, Gorilla Glass on the front panel, and Lenovo's signature textured aramid fiber back panel for a softer touch. The whole device is IP68 rated for strong dust and water resistance, and it's also MIL-STD-810H compliant to protect against falls and more extreme conditions.
In addition to the ThinkPad-like look and feel, there's a red key on the side of the phone in a nod to Lenovo's classic keyboard nub. You can customize it to a degree: a double-press can be assigned one of the phone's ThinkPad integration features, while a single-press can act as an app shortcut. Some apps will even let you launch certain features -- mapping it to the "Pay" screen of the Starbucks app could save you a lot of embarrassing fumbling at the register, for example. The ThinkPhone is available first to enterprise customers, with general availability on April 28th via Motorola.com.
In addition to the ThinkPad-like look and feel, there's a red key on the side of the phone in a nod to Lenovo's classic keyboard nub. You can customize it to a degree: a double-press can be assigned one of the phone's ThinkPad integration features, while a single-press can act as an app shortcut. Some apps will even let you launch certain features -- mapping it to the "Pay" screen of the Starbucks app could save you a lot of embarrassing fumbling at the register, for example. The ThinkPhone is available first to enterprise customers, with general availability on April 28th via Motorola.com.
Uh (Score:2)
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Even without espionage, this involves Motorola handing IP to Lenovo.
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I gotta admit that I totally would bought one of these ThinkPhones if they released it ten years ago. The Lenovo Thinkpad line has kinda lost some of its "Kinda cool, for a business device anyway" cache from competitors like HP and Apple since then.
Once you have a Macbook Pro and an iPhone, the vendor lock-in kicks in and it gets tougher to go back to Windows and Android.
Re: Uh (Score:2)
What does this compete with? (Score:2)
$600? No pen? No folding?
After using my Z Fold 4 I don't want to ever give those two features up
No thanks (Score:3)
Don't want a display with a HOLE in it. It is a mystery to me why this seemingly obvious fact appears to be so extraordinarily difficult for vendors to understand.
Need an SD card slot because internal storage is insufficient.
Need TRRS used regularly for hands free calling.
Want IPS display not OLED.
Want a removable battery.
No sale.
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The only recent-ish phone I know of that meets those specs is the Motorola Moto E6.
If you consider 2019 to be recent.
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Excellent post, grandpa! An SD card slot would be a great place to store the MP3 collection you downloaded from Napster!
great (Score:2)
another giant glass screen with giant bulky camera and three buttons on the side. just what i wanted. yet another bulky expensive future paperweight that's crap at general purpose computing.
would it kill them to put in a clickwheel? a tiny keypad, anywhere on that humongous footprint? it could even be a fold-out, i don't care. just give me something anywhere as useful for productivity as a blackberry used to be. not all of us use our phone for tiktok.
Slide out QWERTY (Score:3)
I am still waiting for someone to offer a modern phone with a slide-out full qwerty keyboard. I could actually get some work done on my ancient Nokia N900 (keyboard + linux based OS), haven't been able to type efficiently since on a phone. It seems to me like a killer "enterprise" phone feature, yet nobody has given it a try.
Even manufacturers that churn out dozens of models per quarter are not giving this a try. I owned a Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 which was a wonderful phone with an amazing sliding mechanism (a magnetic rail thingy, no springs), but they only used it for the front camera - to avoid a notch/hole). I was hoping they'd use that the other way around to slide out a keyboard at some point, but nothing...
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Look at the Fxtec Pro1 and Pro1X. They're the best choice at the moment and actually quite good (The Pro1 is my favorite one after the HTC Desire Z and Blackberry Priv, and I've owned a few):
https://www.fxtec.com/smartpho... [fxtec.com]
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That looks interesting, however it is both out of stock and, like all crowdfunded attempts at smartphones it is lagging quite a bit in hardware. The Snapdragon 662 was low-mid end 3 years ago, it's very slow, especially for Android (they offer Ubuntu, but no Sailfish). The camera sensor is also very old (although Pixel phones make up for it with some fancy software and CPU, that would not apply here) and there are no extra things to make up for deficiencies like usb OTG etc - it's just the keyboard.
My point
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it's very slow
No, it isn't. It's only slow relative to what you can get, but mobile phone CPUs have been more than fast enough for pretty much all tasks for years. I never have to 'wait' for some task to complete on my phone (how else would you judge slowness?).
The camera sensor is also very old
Yeah, the camera is pretty crappy.
it's just the keyboard.
My point was I'd like a major manufacturer to make a high end phone like that, so I wouldn't have to compromise significantly for the keyboard. Am I asking for too much?
Yes. Hardware keyboard phones have always had midrange hardware, because they would otherwise be too expensive. It's a niche product as it is and I for one will gladly forgo camera quality for effortless typing. I personally would
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I am still waiting for someone to offer a modern phone with a slide-out full qwerty keyboard. I could actually get some work done on my ancient Nokia N900 (keyboard + linux based OS), haven't been able to type efficiently since on a phone. It seems to me like a killer "enterprise" phone feature, yet nobody has given it a try.
Have you considered trying a Blackberry-factor bluetooth keyboard? I see them on AliExpress for under $8.
https://www.aliexpress.com/ite... [aliexpress.com]
Why does a business phone need this crap? (Score:4, Informative)
And where's my QWERTY keyboard for all of my important emails and the proprietary cloud-based messaging services that I use? I understand that not everyone wants keyboards anymore, even some of the non-children, but they have been a feature of business-focused phones for a long time now.
And the cost... I realize that as an important manager of executives, nothing is too good for me. And nothing makes me happier than hearing, "tax deductible business expense." But this still seems excessive for what I need. Can I write more emails on this $700 phone-with-no-keyboard than I can on a $200 phone-with-no-keyboard? Will this expensive phone help me move a larger portion of my company's previously robust IT infrastructure to a trendy cloud-based solution? I don't see that it will.
The only thing I like about this is the durability. That's nice.
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On the other hand, my (Oneplus and Pixel) phones batteries have lasted longer than me being satisfied with their speed and options.
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I have to say I don't get it either. It's pretty much a generic mid-high end Android phone with a Thinkpad-like theme. About the only thing mildly interesting about it seems to be the back case having something you can grip onto rather than the slippery glass/metal used by most other phones.
They could have accomplished much of the same thing by making a $5 Thinkpad-themed case that could be used with other phones.
Spec? (Score:2)
Hardware != Software (Score:3)
This could just have been another Motorola phone, perhaps branded 'pro' or something. I guess there's nothing crazy wrong about branding it 'Think' then.
But they're claiming the phone will integrate with the laptop - that's where the whole thing falls apart. The phone doesn't integrate with the laptop at all - the phone software integrates with the laptop software - and we don't need "Think" for that. In fact, if they made some decent 'sync' capabilities between any old Android phone and any old Windows laptop, then they might be onto something. Instead, they're claiming that this very special phone is the only one capable of "talking to" this very special laptop. Even if they make the most perfect software human kind has ever produced, the audience for it will be limited to people with this exact phone and that exact laptop - and the world sure as sh!t isn't going to be giving up its iphones and macbooks just for a bit of software made by a hardware company (with a very poor track record of software, I might add).
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I'll buy the inevitable tablet that comes. (Score:2)
The inevitable release of a Lenovo tablet will be a wonderful nod to "Think!" pads of the past.
Finally a female phone (Score:2)
And now there is also a female phone with this nipple
Just Say (Score:2)