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Lenovos ThinkPad T60 model is getting a wide-screen update.
The Raleigh, N.C., company announced Nov. 28 that it would begin to offer a 5.1-pound, ThinkPad T60 notebook with a 15.4-inch display. The T60 ThinkPad model had previously come with a 14-inch and 15-inch screen.
By offering a bigger screen, Lenovo is continuing to make its ThinkPad series, which still carries the IBM logo, an appealing choice to the notebooks traditional customer base of business users.
The notebook, which will be sold through the companys Web site and through its channel partners, is available as of Nov. 28, said Rajat Aggarwal, product manager for the ThinkPad T series.
“Users today are looking for a notebook that can handle horizontal applications, such as spreadsheets and multimedia displays, and we believe this notebook can do what they need,” Aggarwal said.
Companies such as Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others have been offering more and more notebooks with 14- and 15-inch displays since 2005 as way to appeal to business users.
For Lenovo, the 15.4-inch display ThinkPad T60 is a way to keep pushing into the North American market, which has been slow to recognize the Lenovo brand name, where the IBM label still resonates within the enterprise space.
Lenovo already offers 15-inch and 15.4-inch displays for its notebook in the Lenovo 3000 line, which is geared toward consumers as well as SMBs (small and midsize businesses).
Surveys by the research firms Gartner and IDC have placed Lenovo far behind HP and Dell in PC sales in the United States and worldwide.
The company also struggled to find its way in the market, despite strong sales in China and the rest of Asia, and its fiscal second-quarter results did not meet Wall Street expectations.
The new T60, according to Lenovo, can display 30 percent more information on its screen compared to the 14-inch model.
The 15.4-inch T60 model comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, which runs at 2.30GHz, and comes equipped with either 2GB or 4GB of RAM and a hard drive, which is expandable to up to 160GB of memory.
The notebook also includes wireless WAN service from either Cingular or Verizon, an embedded wireless LAN card based on 802.11n standard wireless network technology as well as Bluetooth wireless technology.
Users also have a choice of Intel or ATI graphics chips.
The new T60 notebook also comes ready for Microsofts new operating system, called Vista, which will be released to enterprise customers on Nov. 30.
The starting price for the 15.4-inch T60 ThinkPad is $1,399, according to Lenovo.