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Cellphones

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.
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Motorola Unveils Co-Branded Lenovo 'ThinkPhone'

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  • No
    • by leonbev ( 111395 )

      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.

      • Lenovo really screwed the pooch with the ThinkPad line, taking reasonably priced elegant business machines that felt great and turning them into overpriced, cheaply made Chinese trinket.
  • $600? No pen? No folding?

    After using my Z Fold 4 I don't want to ever give those two features up

  • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @08:29PM (#63479622)

    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.

    • by Teun ( 17872 )
      Good luck finding the right one.
      • The only recent-ish phone I know of that meets those specs is the Motorola Moto E6.

        If you consider 2019 to be recent.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Excellent post, grandpa! An SD card slot would be a great place to store the MP3 collection you downloaded from Napster!

  • 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.

  • by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:31AM (#63480048) Homepage

    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...

    • 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]

      • by Ecuador ( 740021 )

        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

        • 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

    • 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]

  • by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @04:18AM (#63480074)
    I can't say that I understand the feature set here, this is a business phone for serious business people who do serious business things. This trend towards bulky camera lumps in the back doesn't seem to fit with that. The front facing camera, sure. I could use the front camera for my serious grim-faced business meetings, but this doesn't seem like the place to indulge my fantasies about being an amateur photographer. A simple camera, flush with the rest of the device, sufficient for QR codes or maybe OCR, would be enough for my important business tasks.

    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.
    • Lots of people use cameras to capture white boards or other scribblings from meetings.
      • Any basic camera is sufficient for that. Those big camera bulges are there to accommodate fancy zooms and ultra wide lenses and flashes and such. This camera has a 50 megapixel main sensor, and a 13 megapixel ultrawide.
        • Sure, but who cares about bulges if you are using this in the office? Most phones have stuff that people don't really need or use I don't see why this phone would be different.
    • The least that they could have done is given it a user-replaceable battery. There aren't many such options on the market (in the US, at least) right now, so that would be a distinctive feature. As it is now, it's just another disposable phone.
      • by Teun ( 17872 )
        To an extend I have to agree.
        On the other hand, my (Oneplus and Pixel) phones batteries have lasted longer than me being satisfied with their speed and options.
    • This isn't for business users. The "Think" brand is for brand enthusiasts, and has been since it was sold from IBM to Lenovo. A business user buys a throwaway, or something like a G22 (also by Motorola, $169 at WalMart, $139 on Amazon) This is a meme phone.
    • 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.

  • What are the spec? CPU? RAM? Flash Capacity? I don't care if it has a 3 camera of 48MP, if the CPU is a cheap Mediatek and it has 4GB of RAM, it's useless.
  • by coofercat ( 719737 ) on Thursday April 27, 2023 @07:49AM (#63480286) Homepage Journal

    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).

  • IBM used to give employees a notepad with the word "Think!" on it. That's where the ThinkPad name came from.

    The inevitable release of a Lenovo tablet will be a wonderful nod to "Think!" pads of the past.
  • Ah the thinkpad button, I wouldn't buy a laptop without it.
    And now there is also a female phone with this nipple :)
  • NO !! to this STINKphone

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