Lenovo unveils consumer-oriented desktop PC

IdeaCentre is tricked out with facial recognition and i-bear upon recovery tools

Computerworld |

Lenovo Group Ltd. this week unveiled its first entry into the U.Southward. consumer desktop PC market.

The company, well-known for its popular business organisation-oriented ThinkPad line of laptop computers, said the IdeaCentre K210 desktop is its first consumer desktop calculator sold outside of China.

In January, Lenovo dove into the consumer notebook market with the launch of its IdeaPad laptop line. At the fourth dimension, Craig Merrigan, a vice president at Lenovo, told Computerworld that more than 40% of the market place opportunity in PCs is in the consumer business. "The consumer base is the biggest market place we have not addressed," he noted.

In April, Lenovo continued its consumer laptop push with the release of the IdeaPad U110 notebook PC. Touted as an amusement-oriented and fifty-fifty mode-oriented laptop, the U110 laptop is sold with either a black or ruby cover. It has a textured metal stop, a frameless screen and weighs in at only two.3 pounds.

The IdeaCentre K210 is another aspirant into Lenovo'south consumer family unit.

The new desktop organization, which runs the Intel Cadre 2 Quad processor, uses VeriFace 3 facial recognition technology that enables users to log in past having the camera recognize their faces. The desktop also uses Bright Vision technology that is designed to detect how far away the user is from the monitor and so it can adapt its brightness accordingly.

Dan Olds, an analyst at the Gabriel Consulting Group Inc., said coming out with a consumer desktop is a great motility for the traditionally concern-oriented company.

"Information technology'due south a smart motility, but merely because they're bringing some innovation to it -- non simply putting out standard vanilla boxes," said Olds. "The facial recognition, in detail, is kind of neat, particularly when you have lots of people, like parents and kids, using the same car. The facial matter lets you log in automatically, get your own desktop, and access to your own files. They accept an antibacterial keyboard. The audio is quite nice, but even more important is the one-touch recovery characteristic, where the organisation tin can exist restored after a crash or virus attack

"Other vendors have diverse pieces of this engineering, but it looks like Lenovo has made a full-bodied endeavour to put all the pieces together and make it piece of cake for the nonsophisticated dwelling house users to access," he added.

Sharon Gaudin is an experienced engineering science and science reporter.

Copyright © 2008 IDG Communications, Inc.