.Inside the Box

I thought I’d spend some time on a new Lenovo technology feature, one we call Switchable Graphics.

One of the fundamental choices facing a notebook buyer is what type of graphics subsystem to buy. While there are many different types, the choice can fundamentally be broken down to “Integrated” or “Discrete.”

Integrated graphics are the graphics capabilities that come built in the chipset.

• Advantages: Low cost. They are already built in for “free” as part of the rest of the package. Less power consumption (more on that later.)
• Disadvantages: “Shared” graphics memory, which means you lose some main system memory to graphics. Also, the graphics capabilities of integrated graphics chips decidedly lag those of discrete graphics chips.

Discrete graphics are graphics provided by an external graphics chip, usually by nVIDIA or ATI. These have their own dedicated graphics memory which frees up main system memory for other tasks.

• Advantages: Much faster performance. More capabilities for things like hardware accelerated high definition playback. (Yes I know Montevina integrated graphics supposedly has this capability, but Intel has yet to satisfactorily deliver on that promise)
• Disadvantages: More costly and much more power consumption, which results in less battery life.

On a desktop, the answer is usually simple. If you care about performance, choose a discrete graphics card and don’t worry about it any longer. On a mobile PC, the answer is not quite as cut and dried. The reason is that there are major tradeoffs in battery life with each choice.

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that I’ve always eschewed discrete graphics on my notebooks because they draw significant amounts of power. When you use a discrete graphics chip, you lose an hour or more of use per battery charge. To say this is a huge loss is severely understating the problem.

Most users don’t need this kind of power at all. The integrated graphics chip has more than enough oomph to run Windows, email, web browsing, etc. The rest is wasted as heat and lost productivity due to less system runtime.

That said, there are still a significant number of people that buy discrete graphics because of a single application, or “just in case.” They simply just suffer the gains with the losses.

Enter Switchable Graphics. A Switchable Graphics machine has BOTH an integrated and a discrete graphics chip built into the system. That way there is computing power when you need it and power savings when you don’t. The idea isn’t new. Sony introduced this technology several years ago on one of its ultraportables. However, that implementation had a major drawback. In order to change from integrated to discrete graphics mode, the user had to completely reboot the system – rendering it practically useless.

Lenovo’s implementation is different. We worked with ATI and Intel to develop a system where the user could dynamically swap over from one graphics subsystem to another without having to reboot his/her system. By simply clicking our battery gauge on ThinkPad Power Manager, a user can switch from integrated to discrete modes with 2 – 4 seconds. Though there is a warning that some applications fuss when going from graphics mode to graphics mode, in practical use, most of them behave just fine.

This is one of the primary reasons we switched from nVIDIA graphics back to ATI graphics on our ThinkPad Montevina products. nVIDIA just didn’t have this technology available.

Using switchable graphics allows a user to have the best of both worlds – power savings plus power when you need it. Many people who use this technology set it to run on discrete graphics when plugged into electricity and on integrated graphics while mobile.

The major drawback is that this technology uses architectural improvements in Windows Vista to do its magic and will not work with XP systems. There have been many requests to make this so, and the team is studying whether this would be feasible in a future release.

For those of you running XP, you still have a choice. In BIOS, there is a setting for the graphics subsystem that allows you to choose to run in either integrated or discrete mode. You would have to reboot and go into BIOS to change your preference, but could still switch on an occasional basis.

For me, I’m going to set my next machine BIOS to “integrated” and just leave it there – regardless of what operating system I’m running.

You automatically get switchable graphics capabilities when you choose one of our Montevina systems with an ATI graphics chip. These include the ThinkPad T400, T500, R400, and W500. The one exception is the R500 with ATI graphics. Lenovo did not build this capability into that system.

Today Lenovo announces the ThinkPad W700 notebook. To me, this is the most exciting ThinkPad announcement all year. Not because it is our first 17″ ThinkPad notebook ever. Not because this is one of the powerful machines on the planet (Awe inspiring levels of powerful). No, what has me excited is that this machine was designed from the ground up for photographers.

I know many out there consider Apple to be the standard for photo work, but I think our company has shot a significant salvo across the proverbial Macintosh bow that challenges that dominance. Let me tell you a bit about the ThinkPad W700 and then you can let me know in the comments if you agree or not.

First – you’ll notice the new letter designation. A few weeks ago we announced our first W series, the ThinkPad W500 mobile workstation. Previously we used “p” to designate our mobile workstations. The workstation category of machines has grown significantly in the last few years – so much so that Lenovo decided it needed its own category. Now when you think “ThinkPad W Series” from Lenovo, we want you to associate “W” with “workstation.” A workstation has these attributes: top bin CPUs, ISV software certification, OpenGL graphics solutions, as well as gobs of memory and hard disk space.

Our solution doesn’t disappoint. It features next generation Intel Quad Core Extreme Edition processor choices. It has space for integrated dual HDDs, configurable in RAID 0 (data striping), or RAID 1 (data mirroring) setups. (Yes there are SSD options too). Main memory is expandable to 8GB and the nVIDIA graphics solutions have up to 1GB of graphics memory.

So there is definitely plenty of power. In fact, you can see that its Windows Vista experience score is nearly off the charts. Today, 5.9 is the absolute maximum score possible in any one category. We hit that and bump up against it in several other categories as well.

So it has brawn, but you can rightfully say at this point that I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about what it offers for photographers. In other words, “So what’s the big deal?”

The big deal starts with a beautiful 17″ Widescreen 1920×1200 display with 400 nits of brightness. What’s more, this display displays 72% of the possible color gamut of the Adobe RGB color space. In comparison, most normal laptop displays only show 45% of the Adobe RGB color space, and for this photographer, are absolutely inadequate (read: SUCK). This means that this display is capable of showing more colors than most nearly every other display available – laptop or desktop. A 19″ 72% color gamut display for a desktop costs north of $700, so you aren’t likely to find it at your nearest Best Buy. High end displays like these are usually reserved for graphics professionals. In fact, many of these professionals are still using CRT tube displays because most LCD displays just aren’t good enough. This ThinkPad display is more than good enough.

(Now I know at this point many of you are going to bemoan our lack of IPS display options for your notebooks and will use this post as a catalyst to comment further. Think of this new announcement as adding a high quality display option which we haven’t had in a long time and a step in the right direction. For those of you who don’t know what I’m referring to, here’s my earlier post on the subject.)

Any photographers who are serious about getting their colors right will calibrate their displays so that the colors match what they expect. You want your reds or greens to look exactly as you envisioned them. Without color calibration, you are at the mercy of your lab to get it right. Sadly, most often, they get it wrong. To help these people, we are introducing, to my knowledge, the industry’s first integrated color calibration equipment on a notebook PC. This isn’t a “cheapest rules” color calibrator, but is Pantone’s X-Rite calibrator with HueyPRO software. These are well respected names in the industry. On this ThinkPad, calibration is very easy and is done with the lid closed. You also can see the before and after images so that you get visual confirmation that everything is correct. I have never done any photo editing on any laptop before precisely because of the lack of a wide color gamut or color calibration. This will now change.

The next goodie is an optional WACOM digitizer. WACOM is the same company that makes the digitizer for our ThinkPad X Series Tablet PCs and is again, a well respected industry leader in digitizer technology. The digitizer is especially useful in Photoshop for defining selections, creating masks, or any of about a thousand other tasks. You can map it 1:1 with the entire notebook display, or using a control applet, can map it to a selected area of your screen. It is really cool. I’ve never used a digitizer tablet before when photo editing. The amount of precision control is just amazing compared to a standard mouse.

When you’re at your desk, you will find it integrates well with your workflow. This machine has three ways to connect external displays – VGA, Dual Link DVI, and DisplayPort all built into the side. I wish it could drive three displays at once using each one of those ports, but sadly only two simultaneous displays for now. Perhaps a future version will have this capability.

There is a 7 in 1 card reader built in, and you can also add an integrated Compact Flash reader as an option to replace the Smart Card or Express Card 54 slot. There’s also an optional port replicator with an eSATA port so that you can backup to your network storage device at your office or home.

Admittedly this isn’t our lightest weight machine, but think about what it can do to reduce the clutter in your bag. You can leave behind your color calibrator and USB cable. You can leave behind your digitizer. Since there is support for a second built in HDD, you can have instant backups and leave your external USB HDD at home. This saves time because for the first time you can actually edit in the field or on the airplane ride home vs. having to wait to get to your “real” machine later.

And to top all of these great features, it’s a ThinkPad. It has rock solid design and is built like a tank, not a fragile toy. Just like you buy professional cameras for their build quality, you choose a ThinkPad for the same reasons.

It has thoughtful design touches that are designed for people who actually want to use this system day in and day out. Things like our legendary keyboard, thoughtful ergonomics, and ThinkVantage Technologies designed to help make your life easier, not complicate it.

It has the best service and support in the business.

Can you tell I’m excited? This is a phenomenal piece of equipment unlike anything that has ever been done before in the industry. But of course, I have a few wish list items to improve the next version.

1. I’d like to have a Photoshop overlay template option for the keyboard. Photoshop has a myriad of keyboard shortcuts that are nearly impossible to remember unless you use them every day.
2. I’d like to have an integration bundle with Adobe that includes Photoshop and Lightroom preloaded on the system – preferably at a bundled price.
3. I’d like GPS capability. Geotagging is about the only option I can think of for us mere mortals to care about integrated GPS devices.
4. For a machine this big, a carrying handle would be quite useful, though I think my esteemed colleague, Mr. Hill and fellow members of the Corporate Identity team would heartily disagree.
5. Wi-Fi software tuned for wireless camera sync. Many of the newer SLR cameras have Wi-Fi capabilities in them to wirelessly transmit photos as they are being shot. I can easily imagine a wedding photographer who brings his/her assistant with them. While the ceremony is going on, the assistant is sitting in the back of the church, editing in real time as the images flow into the PC. How cool would it be to have ceremony pictures already available for viewing at a slide show at the couple’s reception? The WOW factor would be HUGE and great for future business. (Or even repeat business if you happen to be a Hollywood celebrity.)
6. I’d LOVE to have a built in battery charger for four AA batteries. This way when I’m out and about with my SB-600 and SB-800 external flashes, I could leave one more thing at home and always be sure of having a source power for battery hungry flashes.

Now it’s your turn. Are you as excited as I am about this machine? Did we get it right? What would YOU like to see on version 2?

Today I am welcoming two guest video bloggers to Inside the Box.  I had the pleasure of working with Rodrigo and Jackie several times while they have been summer interns here at Lenovo.  One of the things that they mentioned early on is that they use a competitor’s tablet at their high school and wondered how they could share their experiences with it – perhaps with a blog entry.  This seemed a perfect thing for a video blog entry.  Take a look if you’re interested in seeing the experiences of two real-world tablet PC school users.  Their script and words are their own. 

As a side note, please keep your discourse civil.  I will be extra careful with moderating comments on this particular post.  It is all right to say negative things, if applicable, but I will not tolerate mean spirited comments and will delete them without warning.  All praise gets directed to them.  Any derision gets directed to me. I was most impressed with what they came up with.  I hope you will be too. 

For those of you wondering why the silence on this blog over the last two weeks despite the biggest ThinkPad announcements yet this year, there is no conspiracy involved. I took two weeks of vacation and had it planned long before the announcement date was set.

Upon coming back and reading my colleague David Hill’s blog post, I fear our ThinkPad SL is taking an undeserved beating in the comments and wanted to write a few words of my own on the topic. Don’t worry; I have plenty to say in the weeks to come about switchable graphics, the new T and X Series, improved power management, and the like. We’ll get to those in good time.

To read the comments on David’s post, we are polluting the brand, driving cheapness and shoddy construction through this conduit of machines. Run and buy every ThinkPad you can see on eBay right now because the end is nigh.

Um, yeah.

If anyone believes this and wants to pay a premium for my used T60 sitting at my desk, go ahead and send me a check. As soon as it clears, I’ll FedEx you a slightly used, twice spilled upon, cracked corner, but still in otherwise serviceable-shape machine.

My point is this: Don’t panic. If you are a loyal ThinkPad T or X Series user, we have not impacted those systems with the announcement of the ThinkPad SL Series. The ThinkPad SL has physical and component elements more in line with those who may be running a small business or home office. It is not meant to take away anything from the master ThinkPad brand, but use that brand to launch a new series that for the first time is truly focused on small business users vs. just configuring an R or T somewhat differently. If you a Lenovo 3000 or R series user today, this machine may in fact be the right machine for you.

Let me take a minute to explain a bit more about the “small business” market.

Go into any retail business shop selling PCs anywhere in the world. Notice the attributes of the machines you see. Shiny. Colors. Glossy. High end multimedia features. I dare even say “bling.” Then look at the customers buying there. There are plenty of consumers buying for home, of course, but what many people don’t realize is that of the millions and millions of small businesses in the world, most do not just go to a .com site and purchase 5 or 10 machines. They buy from the same stores that they buy the rest of their office supplies. They feel comfortable knowing that they have a physical person that they can yell at if things go wrong, and many of these places have more liberal return policies than you’ll find on any internet site.

Many small business owners also have their personal and business lives on a single machine. That same notebook that holds accounts receivable also holds home movies, pictures of grandma, and their entire .mp3 collection. For many of them, the lines of work and pleasure blur considerably, and they have to have a machine that will work with both the attributes of a business as well as a home notebook. Thus, it needs to still be somewhat conservative looking for business situations, but have great speakers and multimedia features for off-hours for when the kids are using it to play games.

Our target market for the ThinkPad SL is not multi-national corporation XYZ, but Joe’s Flower Shop. Joe’s Flower Shop has some important other needs as well. Unlike XYZ, he doesn’t have a dedicated team of help desk people that he can call when things go wrong with his system. He doesn’t have corporate virus scanners, Cisco VPNs, or centralized backup strategies. He’s more likely to ask “What’s a backup strategy?” A key part of the ThinkPad SL experience is for Lenovo to help customers fill in those gaps by providing services that they are not large enough to provide for themselves.

These include accidental damage protection and warranty upgrades – for when the standard warranty isn’t enough. Joe’s Flowers doesn’t have time to deal with waiting multiple days to get his PC up and running. As a business owner, Joe has to worry about his business, not wasting a lot of time with consumer help desk queues. ThinkPad SL also has Complete IT as an offering that is a total outsourced help desk for Joe. He can call one number and get priority routing to Level 2 technicians, support for 3^rd party software he installed on his machine, initiate those critical backups and the like. It’s the help desk he cannot afford to maintain himself.

There are some other questions in the comments, such as why call it a ThinkPad when it clearly is a replacement for the Lenovo 3000 series? In some ways ThinkPad SL is a replacement for the Lenovo 3000 Series and in some ways it isn’t. Lenovo rolled out the 3000 series just after we became a unified company and used the 2006 Olympics as our launch vehicle. To meet this aggressive time schedule, we had to make compromises, chief among them that we never did much of the design for the 3000 series ourselves. Most of it was done by 3^rd party contract manufacturers. This gave us the advantage of speed, but left the 3000 line lacking for many people. ThinkPad SL is different than the 3000 series because we designed the ThinkPad SL series ourselves using ThinkPad engineers. This meant that we used the same rock-solid design principles as other ThinkPad notebooks. Indeed, it doesn’t have Roll Cages nor drainage systems, but it does have technologies like the Active Protection System and goes through the same testing as the rest of the ThinkPad family. The hinges may not be large and external, but they ARE steel and are designed to hold up to the rigors of usage. The ThinkPad SL series is worthy of the ThinkPad moniker because it IS a ThinkPad through and through.

Another point often brought up is why not just include more multimedia features like HDMI and Blu-Ray in the T, R, or X Series lineup? Though it sounds arrogant to say it (and I really don’t mean it that way), our target market for ThinkPad T and X series just won’t pay for them. We always appreciate our very vocal and very important ThinkPad loyalists here, but you represent a very small portion of our target market for ThinkPads. Though YOU would be willing to pay for IPS screens, HDMI, and multimedia card readers, the multinational companies that pay the light bills will not. They quibble over a dollar in cost (times 10,000 machines) and see card readers as a security risk, HDMI ports as superfluous, and IPS screens as unnecessary for workers to simply get their jobs done. That said, we are not ignoring this segment of the market, but unfortunately that’s all I can say until announcement time.

Don’t see the ThinkPad SL Series as a threat to your T Series. See it as a way for us to sell ThinkPad notebooks to others who previously would not have considered us before. Ultimately, our growing our market allows us to funnel even more money into research and development which means more innovation all around for ALL of our notebooks.

We’ve been shipping GPS as an optional capability on our ThinkPad X300 notebooks for several months now. But what’s it good for? What’s the killer app?

There is, of course, the obvious. You can use it with popular programs like Yahoo Maps and Google Earth and find your way across town or across the country. While I’ve tried this, I personally find it lacking. It works okay, and it is certainly better than paying a car rental company $8/day. But the downside of trying to balance a notebook on a narrow dashboard (so it gets a clear view of the sky) whilst managing power cables and AC/DC adapters is not exactly an exercise in elegance. Much less so if you happen to have a spinning HDD and are worried about a crash. A dedicated direction finding device by Garmin et al does a much better job and is much easier to manage.

The requirement for a clear view of the sky has been a major drawback for GPS units since its inception and is a primary limitation for notebook use particularly, since most are used indoors. One of the ways that has been developed as a way around this is called “assisted GPS.” Assisted GPS uses GPS satellites in conjunction with cellular phone towers to provide more accurate location information. Much more importantly, it allows GPS to work indoors away from a window. This capability opens up much more possibilities for the usefulness of GPS in future applications.

Consider first, the security implications. Imagine a notebook equipped with a GPS receiver that works only inside the Pentagon. It knows where it is, knows that it is in safe territory, and therefore allows itself to be fully functional. Once it moves outside the front gate, it immediately locks itself down (or “bricks” itself in commonly used industry terms). The device is rendered useless to thieves and any state secrets are safely kept that way.

For non sleuths, you can start to tie this together with networking. Imagine Lenovo tying this capability to network switching and configuration software (like our Access Connections) to further improve usability. When you were in your home or at work, not only would it open up file and internet sharing, but it would also know which devices are in the vicinity so that it could operate with them correctly. Yes, we can set default printers by profile in Access Connections today, but imagine a world where your PC knows automatically which devices it has to work with and you don’t have to see the print dialogue box at all ever again. It’s useful for making the process that much more automatic and worry free.

Secretaries everywhere would know where on the campus their executives were located. (They’re going to have their PCs, right?) This would solve the eternal problem of “Where’s Sam? Get him in here NOW!!”

Firefighters, police officers, insurance adjusters and even casual hobbyists could use GPS capability to automate geotagging of their photos. Yes, there are cameras with GPS capabilities built in, but until we are all carrying one, imagine taking your photos, and then upon loading them into the laptop you have with you, they are automatically tagged with location information based on a synchronized clock between your camera and PC.

This would also extend to foresters and those in the field using programs like ARCView. Today they have to manually enter GPS coordinates in order to perform their map analysis.

Despite all of this, I’m still searching for the elusive killer app for GPS on a notebook PC. Ideas anyone?

I’m totally finished with spinning drives on my ThinkPads. At least if I have anything to say about it.

I was fortunate enough to be able to swap to a solid state hard disk drive in my ThinkPad this week. I had always derided the 64GB capacity as too small, but when the opportunity presented itself, it was too good to pass up.

I have always been a fan of 7200 rpm HDDs in notebooks, long ago having rejected 5400 rpm as being way too slow for use in any system that does more than surf the Web. Thus, a 7200 rpm HDD has been a basic requirement for me in my last three notebooks.

Let’s look at the requirements of a PC running three years ago vs. today. Both may be running Windows XP, but today’s PC has to contend with more personal firewalls, security scanners, management agents, and system utilities all running constantly in the background. Over the next 1 -2 years, plan on adding virtualization to this list. This is before you have even launched your first application. Worse, they all require care and feeding (i.e. processor cycles) in order to keep themselves up to date.

In short, though your application load hasn’t changed much in the last several years, your background computing load most certainly has – and not for the better. All of this activity is heavily disk bound, and I didn’t realize just how much until I switched two days ago.

To start the swap process, my first task was to prune away some disk usage. Since this is my work PC, it wasn’t that bad. Honestly, did I really need presentations from five years ago anyway? Having done so, I was able to get my system down to 40GB of drive space used, well within the capacity range of an SSD drive. I also got rid of our service partition which saved me a few extra GB of space on top of that.

I used our Ultrabay adapter and slid the empty SSD drive into my system as a second drive. Windows churned for a few minutes, loaded a driver or two, and then it automagically appeared as my D:\ drive in Windows Explorer. I formatted it just to be safe.

Then my next problem was how to size and clone my hard disk partition so that it could be copied to the new SSD. I started with Partition Magic, but then after a bit of web research realized there was a much better solution available. I ended up using Acronis’ Migrate Easy product. If there was ever truth in naming, this product certainly qualifies. I highly recommend this product, so much so that I’m giving them a plug in this blog. After answering a few simple questions, the product rebooted, did its job, and then was finished 30 minutes later. I swapped my spinning HDD out for my SSD, hit the power button, and as quickly and as easily as that, was up and running.

The difference was immediate and dramatic. Boot time was cut in half. Our corporate email program and instant messaging program also load in one half of the time they used to. Even opening and closing large MS Office PowerPoint files is a much faster operation than ever before. Though all of those were enough to make me go “Wow!,” here is the most surprising thing of all:  my web browsing has become noticeably much zippier. Pages literally just snap into place. I never thought browsing was slow before, so the difference is all the more dramatic. A few more observations:

• This drive definitely runs cooler. I can’t even feel it under my palm rest like I could with my old drive. Write times are definitely slower than read times, but still faster than before. I’m okay with that.
• Battery life has definitely improved. When I am actively using my PC, I get about an extra 20 – 30 minutes per charge. When I’m doing something more passive (at least from a system perspective) like email, my battery life is now about an hour longer than before.
• I’m glad I did this on my existing system vs. switching to a new system for two reasons. One, it gave me a definite point of performance comparison. On one boot I was using my spinning drive. On the next I was using an SSD. Nothing else changed. Two, it meant that I still had a normal voltage processor (Intel Core 2 T7700) instead of a wimpy ultra low voltage processor. I know there are plenty of people happy with ULV processors, but I consider them anemic at best. When I am on battery power (and allow my processor to throttle down), there is a distinct difference in performance on read/write times to and from the SSD. This isn’t to say that my SSD suddenly requires 50% of system resources to operate. Rather, that for the first time that I can ever recall, my processor is the bottleneck, NOT the drive. That’s pretty amazing if you stop to think about it.
• My Active Protection System driver was up to date, and I was pleased to see that it automatically adjusted to the SSD drive. The driver is definitely still loaded, but it is smart enough to realize that I have an SSD drive and therefore will not pause the system if I move around. Why keep the driver, you ask? Well, for those times when I put a second spinning drive in the Ultrabay, I want to make sure it has APS protection. More importantly, I should still be able to play APS games.

All in all, I could not be more pleased with the whole experience. This is the biggest boost I have ever noticed in terms of system performance – more than getting a brand new system. I am one hundred percent convinced I had such a great experience because our engineering, product, and development teams picked the right drive to offer as part of our portfolio (the same Samsung drive as found in our ThinkPad X300).

As I’ve said in past blog posts, not all SSD drives are the same. There are some real performance dogs out there. Do your homework. Make sure you have current backups. And if you have the money, definitely budget for one of these in your next mobile PC purchase.

I’m welcoming Mike Pierce today as a guest blogger.  Mike is our Director of Environmental Affairs and he is writing today about a new service offering from Lenovo.  The video is particularly interesting and won’t take you long to watch.

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Today, there is a lot of discussion and interest in what happens to computers after their useful life is over. For individuals this really means how they are disposed, since those products are usually old enough that there is no secondary market for them. However, for commercial customers, the currently installed base often is around three or four years old and may have significant useful life remaining. One of the basic tenets of environmental responsibility is short handed as R3 - reduce, reuse, recycle. Reusing products is much preferred to recycling, and certainly to disposal. At Lenovo, one of our key objectives is making it easier for customers to do business with us. In my role, I work to make our products, our processes and everything we do more environmentally responsible. It’s nice to see when both these things intersect, as they do with a new service we’re starting to offer at the end of the month called Lenovo Asset Recovery Services.That’s a long name for taking back old computers and other electronic products and either refurbishing or recycling them. Since becoming a global supplier, we’ve been moving toward managing a number of offerings ourselves – this is one of them. It’s open to our business customers in the U.S. and we’ll be rolling it out to other countries later this year. Since we own the service, it means Lenovo now does everything from designing and manufacturing the computer to deployment and finally to the disposal of the used products when the customer replaces them.

Today we’ll look at what I promised last time – a more advanced look at docking and some of the things that ThinkPad engineers have to trade off as they are designing next generation docking solutions.

Docking is one of those subjects that makes me cringe whenever a customer brings it up in conversation. It means one of several things, none of them particularly enjoyable to talk about: End of life for current docks, lack of a needed port, compatibility issues, or functionality problems. All people who use docking seem to have a strong opinions on the subject. While there are some similarities, there is very little consensus as to what the “ideal” solution is.

Just a reminder, for purposes of this post, I am using “docking” as a generic term to mean anything that allows cable management on a notebook PC. When the differences are important, I will break out and delineate them.

USB DOCKING

When we design a docking solution for a product, it is not just as easy as putting a connector on it and that’s it. The easiest way out is to use a USB port already on the system. As vendors we do not need to do anything special to the notebook. A user simply plugs in their USB port replicator and it works. The disadvantage is that while USB is ubiquitous, it has major bandwidth limitations, allowing only 480 Mb/s data transfer rates. This is just nowhere near enough to have high quality digital video + Gigabit Ethernet + other USB devices. While USB 3.0 would seem to be a solution and is on the horizon for next year (if the industry gets its act together and stops bickering), it still will not be fast enough. While the standard will up the speed to 4.8 Gb/sec, this is barely adequate for full high definition video and will not be enough for video plus all of the other devices you may want to connect. However, it will bring about a radical improvement and may end up being adequate for many.

DEDICATED DOCKING

To get around the bandwidth problems, vendors add their own proprietary connectors underneath or on the sides of their systems. Putting a connector on the side of a system is most convenient for the user, but doing so takes up valuable real estate that could be used by additional ports. Putting the connector on the bottom solves the space utilization problem, but it does require special design consideration so that the user does not have to “hunt” to try and find the proper alignment to snap the notebook in place on the dock. An additional disadvantage to bottom docking connectors is that they add thickness and therefore weight to the system.

If you look at a docking connector closely, you’ll see two to four rows of closely spaced wires (or “pin outs” as they’re commonly known in the industry). Each of these pins has a dedicated function and connects directly into the notebook’s expansion bus for maximum speed and compatibility. Some minor functions like PS/2, serial, or floppy disk drive functionality only require one pin or so. Other more advanced bandwidth-hungry functions such as video or Ethernet require 2 or more wires to successfully transmit data back and forth. There are also wires dedicated to providing power and grounding. As we add more functions, ThinkPad engineers have to start making tradeoffs as there simply aren’t enough wires to do everything we want. Want more than 2 USB ports externally? There go 4 additional wires? DVI? Twelve. And so on…

We could theoretically add more wires and get around this, but as the docking connector size increases there are not only electrical issues to solve, but the connector gets to be so physically big that it takes up valuable real estate on the notebook itself. This is why our X Series Ultraportable ThinkPads do not share a common dock with our T, R, and Z series notebooks. The docking connector is physically smaller which makes it incompatible with the docks its bigger cousins use. Our Product Marketing team determined that adding the same size connector as the T and R series would have grown X Series thickness and weight to unacceptable levels for an ultraportable (where size and weight are THE considerations).

In fairness, not everyone shares this same view. There are customers who would much rather have common docking with the rest of the product line and would be happy to have thicker and heavier ultraportables to achieve this. In fact, one of our customers, a large retailer in the UK, actually buys our old ThinkPad X31 notebooks on the tertiary (!!!) market just so that they can have common docking with their current port replicators and docks that they have installed in their hot desk environment.

COMMON DOCKING

Another common question I commonly get goes something like this: Docking is SO expensive for me as a customer and I don’t like to manage the complexity of having multiple expansion devices in my user environment. Why can’t you just keep the same ones you have always had for 5, 10, or even 50 years?

Though many people accuse us of the contrary, we don’t want to change docking solutions. We don’t want to drive customer dissatisfaction. Many customers upon hearing that they will have to update their expansion options use it as an opportunity to go out to RFP. The line of thinking goes something along the lines of “Well, if I have to spend money to update my fleet of expansion docks anyway and start fresh, I might as well use the opportunity to see what other vendors have to offer.” Customers are won and lost over docking changes.

We change docking primarily to add functionality and secondarily to add usability improvements. If you still had your docks from five years ago, you’d still be connecting with USB 1.1. You’d also only have one or two USB ports. There would be no digital audio out, your video resolution out would be extremely limited, and so forth. From time to time, as the industry changes, vendors must change docking simply to keep up with the times. On the horizon are other “must have” ports like DisplayPort or USB 3.0. Each of these will require architectural changes (i.e. more pins) in order to accommodate them. While vendors strive for compatibility with older systems, sometimes adding support for the latest and greatest means changing the number of pins and/or changing what each pin does. You don’t want your ThinkPad trying to get a video signal from the power input, for example.

RIP AND GO

Another question: “Why do I have to push the eject button on my port replicator or dock. Why can’t I just rip it off the port replicator and go?” Everyone, especially our usability team, would love this to be so. Unfortunately this is out of our control. Architecturally, the way Windows is written, taking a device off without notifying the operating system can cause “bad things” to happen. Bad things can be anything from system hangs to data loss, to blue screens of death. You are much more likely to have a problem if you have a “legacy” serial or parallel device connected to your port replicator or dock. If you just use USB devices, you’ll probably get away with it, but play in the deep end of the pool at your own risk.

WIRELESS AND THE FUTURE OF DOCKING

I’ve saved the most interesting part for last. Long term, physical docking becomes irrelevant. Just about every problem we have with docking today can be solved with a wireless docking solution. The one exception is power. There is no way that wireless power is going to be ready for mainstream use anytime in the next few years.

Wireless docking in theory sounds like a panacea. Just plug all of those wires into a centralized wireless hub, and then use radio waves to bounce the signals back and forth from the wireless hub to the notebook PC. You can literally sit down at your desk and be connected to your peripherals instantly.

Alas, what will be perfect in the future ain’t ready today. (Bad grammar for emphasis). Again, we get back to the problem of bandwidth. There just isn’t enough. The most promising technology is Ultra-wideband (UWB) which is a very efficient way of transmitting high amounts of data over short distances using a wide portion of the radio spectrum. It is pretty much interference free and a currently shipping standard. You may know the technology by its commonly used name, Wireless USB, which is a software protocol imposed on the physical UWB medium. If that last statement left you totally confused, don’t worry. It’s not that important.

UWB technology is very good and very fast, but it still isn’t fast enough for PC needs. One problem is that its range falls by the square of the distance between the hub and the radio. A reader asked about a competing vendor who has been shipping wireless port replicators and why their range was so limited. This signal fall off problem is why that is so.

With time the engineers will find a way to add more wireless bandwidth to systems. For now, it is possible to use things like compression to increase the effective bandwidth. This is often done with video in which an interface out of the graphics processor intercepts the raw data, compresses it, and then sends it to the wireless hub. Once it arrives, the process is repeated in reverse and the image shows up on your display screen. The subsystem is intelligent enough to send only the changes in the image and thus save bandwidth. When you are using something like an email program, this is not an issue. However, crank up your copy of the Matrix and start watching the lobby gunfight scene, and you’ve got some problems. And this is only for one display. Adding support for a second display means that you need to at least double the bandwidth.

I hope this post provided some more insight into the world of docking. Feel free to expound or ask questions in the comments.

As I mentioned in the last post, we are actively soliciting feedback and opinions on future docking possibilities. If you would be willing to provide some feedback by participating in this survey, our team would be very interested what you have to say. We will not use your information for marketing purposes (i.e. sell you out). Here’s the link. If there’s interest, I’ll share some of those findings from the survey with you all at a future date.

I’ve purposely held off posting part two of the docking series because there have been numerous developments, and I wanted to incorporate the latest information I’ve learned. Today is just a bit of fun on the Friday before the US Memorial Day weekend holiday. I’ll get back to the heavy lifting next week with Docking Part 2.

A few weeks ago I was visiting Switzerland presenting to a large customer in hopes of winning their business. While there, the Switzerland team asked if I could stop by Zurich and present to the local sales and marketing folks. Right before I arrived, the team had just taken delivery of three Lenovo wrapped automobiles.

I am not sure if wrapping vehicles has become popular in many places around the world, but it certainly has become much more prevalent here in the US. Pascal, the country manager, proudly beamed as he told me about the three vehicles sitting in his parking lot and how exciting it was to build the Lenovo brand just by driving around town.

In addition to building our brand by sponsoring things like the Olympics, Formula One, and the NBA, each country or region also has brand building money to use as they would like. This is one of the more creative ways I have seen to use that allotment.

I took a few pictures too, but credit for all of these plus the Photoshop work goes to Wolfgang. In addition to being a good salesman, he’s also a fantastic photographer.

If you do happen to be in the neighborhood of the Lenovo Zurich office, stop in. See the team and look at their mini product showcase. While you are visiting, ask for a cup of coffee. The team has one of the best espresso machines I have ever experienced.

Today’s post will be the first in a two part series discussing docking and expansion capabilities for notebook PCs. I want to talk about some of the tradeoffs and design considerations that go into making docks and port replicators. However, first we need to cover some background so that the follow up post makes sense. Those with a Masters or Ph.D. in Docking are more than welcome to guest lecture in the comments.

The industry uses the word “docking” as a generic way to describe a device that attaches to your notebook PC which provides a centralized place to plug in cables through one connection on your notebook. Sometimes this is done for convenience – to avoid having to disconnect and reconnect multiple wires each time you sit down at your desk. Other times it is to add ports or functionality that do not exist on the notebook itself.

“Docking” for Lenovo notebooks can mean one of multiple options, not all of which are available on every system. In order of increasing complexity and functionality:

First is a USB attached port replicator that adds additional USB ports, VGA display output, Ethernet, and some PS/2 ports to the system. It is designed primarily for convenience, as routing all signals through one USB port not only saves USB ports on the notebook itself, but also makes it very easy to connect and disconnect from the system. In addition to ThinkPads, this will also work for our Lenovo 3000 and IdeaPad lines. Theoretically it would also work with a desktop, though I’m not sure why you’d want it to. The advantage of using a USB port replicator is that it is very easy to use and is broadly compatible. The disadvantage is that it is only suitable for basic cable management. Since everything is routed through one USB port, the bandwidth is shared and performance of the peripherals will suffer. This is especially true with video connections, but also applies to Ethernet. Routing a gigabit Ethernet connection through a 400Mb/sec. USB connection that is also carrying video, audio, and other signals isn’t exactly high performance computing.

Next up the food chain is our Essential Port Replicator. At this point, all vendors in the industry move away from generic expansion that will work across many systems and into proprietary solutions designed to suit the needs of their specific notebook PCs. In other words, don’t expect your Lenovo ThinkPad to plug into a Dell port replicator, and vice versa. Instead of connecting through a USB port, our Advanced Port Replicator uses the ThinkPad docking port found on the bottom of the majority of ThinkPad T, R, and Z series notebooks. It also introduces the concept of “drop in” docking, which means you place your ThinkPad on top of the port replicator and snap it into place. Its overall function and ports are similar to the USB port replicator mentioned above, and its primary mission is cable management – to avoid the hassle of having to disconnect and reconnect power, Ethernet, VGA display, speakers, etc. every time you move away from your desk. Since it connects directly to the system bus, it avoids the performance problems a USB port replicator. Many vendors have their own versions of port replicators under a variety of names.

Stepping up is what is considered by many to be the sweet spot of ThinkPad docking and expansion, our ThinkPad Advanced Mini Dock. This is our best seller overall mainly because it adds significant functionality to the ThinkPad notebooks that support it. These include items like more USB ports, serial port, parallel port, a built in key lock, and most importantly, a DVI port to enable connecting a digital display. Using both the VGA port plus the DVI port, our Advanced Mini Dock can support two simultaneous external displays. It also ships with a second power supply so that you can leave your other power supply in your laptop bag. Again, this level of port replicator is a common item for a vendor to have as an option for its business systems.

The grand daddy of all expansion is called “full docking.” We call our version the ThinkPad Advanced Dock. At this level, it is common to add a few additional ports, but a full dock really exists to add an optical drive/HDD expansion bay and/or a PCI Express graphics slot. This graphics slot will allow a dedicated graphics card to be added so that a system can drive more than two simultaneous displays. Only a few vendors offer a full sized dock, as many see it as an anachronism of a bygone era.

One of the versions above usually works well with full sized notebooks, but ultraportable notebooks (12″ displays or smaller) are a totally different story. Notebook vendors are split as to how they address docking for their smallest notebooks. There are three options, each with its own benefits and tradeoffs:

1. Add support for the same port replicators and docks that bigger cousins in the vendor’s lineup use (known as common docking).
2. Provide a dedicated way to expand that is optimized for the smaller sized notebook. We do on our X Series notebooks and tablets with the ThinkPad X series Media Slices.
3. Eschew docking completely – only support USB port replicators. Another option just emerging in the industry is wireless docking. This is how we address expansion for our ThinkPad X300. (More on wireless docking in the follow up post).

Option one, adding support for the same docks and port replicators that bigger systems use, seems perfect. Customers who use “hot desking” love this compatibility. Hot desking is often used in sales or other environments when users are commonly away from the office. Instead of giving each person a dedicated desk, users can drop in to the office once every so often, find an empty desk, and then sit down and work. This saves real estate space since on average only a small percentage of people will come by the office to work.

Companies who use hot desking love common docking because it allows them to set up a standardized work environment with external display, keyboard, mouse, and Ethernet connection all connected to a port replicator or dock. Regardless of whether a user uses an ultraportable notebook or a full sized notebook, the company does not have to worry about having to supply different docks and port replicators.

While this seems like the obvious solution to implement, it has a significant tradeoff – adding support for common docking adds considerable thickness and weight to a notebook. Ultraportable users are extremely conscious about both of these, and are often unwilling to add to system bulk to get common docking with the rest of the family lineup. Since the ultraportable range is the most highly contested (though not the biggest volume) area of notebook design, being even a few ounces or tenths of a kg heavier or thicker can dramatically impact sales.

Option two involves creating a dedicated “expansion base” for the smallest ultraportable systems. This is the option most often chosen by system designers. Our ThinkPad X series Media Slice is one example of this category. By being optimized for one particular notebook family, it can be made small, portable, and also address any shortcomings not available on the main product. For example, we use our Media Base to add support for an Ultrabay optical drive, DVI, and a few more USB ports. Since the design is small and light, it is versatile enough to be portable. Admittedly though, few people actually carry it around with them. For those people who leave it behind, we also provide a key lock to lock the notebook in place when it is on the user’s desk for more security.

Option three is to simply not provide a connector for docking at all. A few months ago, this meant a user would only be able to use a USB port replicator. However, with the availability of Ultra-Wideband technology (UWB), wireless docking is just becoming a possibility. Unfortunately though, it is no panacea either. More on that in the next post.

I hope this post has laid the groundwork for some more advanced discussion next time. In the next post, Docking 201, we’ll explore the following topics: Tradeoffs in designing docks, usability considerations, advanced video support, wireless docking, the future of docking, and more (your suggestions welcome). That’s when the real fun begins.

For now, we are actively soliciting feedback and opinions on future docking possibilities. If you would be willing to provide some feedback by participating in this survey, our team would be very interested what you have to say. We will not use your information for marketing purposes (i.e. sell you out). Here’s the link.