Lenovo is adding a new notebook to its lineup, and weighing in at 3.9 pounds and offering up to 5 hours of battery life, the Lenovo M30 looks like it could be a reasonably portable notebook.
What’s more, the laptop features an Intel Haswell processor and a starting price of about 500 Euros, which suggests it could sell for around $500 in the US if and when the Lenovo M30 makes it across the pond.
The laptop was first spotted at Lenovo’s Swedish website.
The Lenovo M30 isn’t exactly a high-end computer. But its specs show that mid-range portable notebooks are a lot nicer in 2014 than they have been in years past.
It’s powered by an Intel Core i3-4010U processor and features 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive with 8GB of solid state cache.
The notebook has a 1366 x 768 pixel display, 1 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and features HDMI and SD card slots. It runs Windows 8.1.
What you don’t get is a high resolution display, a touchscreen, or other premium features like a backlit keyboard. It’s likely this machine will be marketed as a notebook rather than an ultrabook — but its thin and light design a pretty good demonstration of the impact Intel’s ultrabook push has had on the mid-range laptop market.
Lenovo hasn’t yet announced official pricing or release countries for the Lenovo M30 laptop.
via Mobile Geeks
“What you don’t get is a high resolution display, a touchscreen, or other premium features”
Yea a $100-150 (100-150€) chinese tablet gets you that PREMIUM what makes “higher end” ultrabooks so SPECIAL..
There’s no reasonable way to explain why cheap tablets have 1080p screens while midrange note/ultrabooks have so low resolution and quality screens.
Plenty of reasons…
1) Larger screens cost more, they’re priced by surface area… and the higher the quality then the higher the premium the screen adds…
2) Higher resolutions are harder to back light, so they’re still developing better technology to reduce the need to increase lumens to compensate, which can significantly add to system power consumption and heat generation…
3) Higher resolutions require both more GPU performance and more CPU performance, this isn’t much of a issue for a mobile OS with easy to run mobile apps but a desktop OS with desktop apps are an entirely different order of magnitude that requires a lot more performance, especially for the more powerful programs/apps or games, to run well and thus is a counter to the usual benefits of having a higher resolution screen…
4) Traditional desktop still doesn’t scale too well to high resolution, especially on relatively small screens…
5) Unlike mobile devices, larger devices like laptops and desktops aren’t used with the screen usually closer than just over two feet from the user… This means it doesn’t take as high a pixel density to still look good because factors like whether it looks “retina” is subjective according to distance the screen is viewed from… thus it’s 2 in 1 devices that increasingly add tablet usage to typical PC usage that’s starting to change the status quo in favor for pushing greater average resolution but the above reasons still apply to limit by how much…
Take the newest release of the Razer gaming laptop as an example… It finally introduces a 3200×1800 high quality screen but it also increases the price for the first time, previous models typically get lower in price each generation, by $400 and the battery life was reduced about 2 hours from the previous model as well…
Along with adding the issue that many games are a lot harder to run at that high resolution and despite having high end, for laptops, components that users often need to scale down and/or lower settings to properly run those games… and we are talking about a system with hardware specs that would put Ultrabooks to shame in terms of performance…
900p or 1080p panels are not notably higher priced than the lowres ones, just $50-100 more as replacement parts for consumers, much less for manufacturers.
Sorry but that’s not accurate… especially to what is actually being discussed here because you erroneously wanted to make comparisons between laptop and tablet screens!
The most obvious thing you’re ignoring is pixel density… A 1080P tablet that’s only 10.1″ or smaller will have a higher pixel density than a laptop screen that’s 13.3″ or larger!
So right off the bat you’re not really comparing how much the actual screen technology costs because you’re only comparing subjective resolution but a lower pixel density screen will of course be cheaper to make per size than a higher pixel density screen…
Next, you’re ignoring how the market is organized… Supply and demand and mass production all effect costs… Thing to realize is you won’t find something like 900P is every available screen size and thus it’s only affordable for those screen sizes it is common for… otherwise they’ll have to custom make it and the cost rise really quickly when they do that!
Other factors you’re also ignoring is the other aspects of screen quality besides resolutions… Many laptops use cheaper TN screens but they generally don’t have good viewing angle range and are generally lower quality in other aspects of screen quality as well…
But tablets typically also use screens that not only have higher resolution, to get to higher pixel density, but also need to be more color accurate, have high brightness to be usable outside and to compensate for the higher pixel density that makes lighting them harder, usually IPS for wide viewing angles, etc.
Many phones and tablets use screen technology that’s simply not practical to use on larger devices because the technology is not cheap enough and usually too hard to scale up beyond a certain point…
So no, like it or not there are many reasons why you can’t compare the tablet screens to laptops… It really is a completely different market…
Bullshit. There was no discussion about PPI, and infact it is quite irrelevant to my point. Let me say again; for example 13.3″ 900p or 1080p panels cost just $50-100 more as replacement parts for consumers (much less more for manufacturers) than the 13.3″ 768p panels they are using now. The point was, when this price difference is so little, why aren’t higher resolution screens more common in midrange note/ultrabooks.
Also, you said “Larger screens cost more, they’re priced by surface area” and “lower pixel density screen will of course be cheaper to make per size than a higher pixel density screen”, so you see: a few inches larger but lower in pixel density screens should be about the same price to manufacture, this is why i made the laptop and tablet comparison in the first message.
Sorry, if you’re confusing yourself but it really is just you!
1) Comparing Tablets to Laptop screens automatically brings in pixel density because resolution isn’t the only factor, as repeatedly stated now!
Actual tablet screens of similar resolution scaled up to laptop sizes means much higher than 1080P resolutions in the first place!
2) You’re also ignoring multiple other points, apparently simply because you don’t want to understand!
Cost do go up for laptops because they’re larger, contrary to your belief the prices can go very high and there are screens that cost hundreds by themselves, they compensate by going with less expensive screen technology but you have yet to even consider the implication of what that means, they also have to consider what’s easily available off the self and like pointed out not all resolutions are readily available at all sizes and even when they are it doesn’t mean they’re the same quality or don’t compromise in some other aspect of screen quality like refresh rates, unlike what you may make it sound like there are plenty of models with 1080P resolutions as well as the lower resolutions and it’s usually just a matter of price range for the system to justify the premium for the screen…
And let’s not forget that you’re even ignoring that a given resolution on a given size screen is also subjective to how far away the screen is being viewed and this is different between tablets and laptops!
You’re also ignoring what progress they have made in laptop screens… It used to be that only really low quality TN screens were used, except for really high priced premium models… Now we more commonly see IPS quality screens used more and more…
Things like touch screens, and other sensors, can easily add a lot to a cost of device but Ultrabooks are managing to bring those and more at under $1000 when Thin & Light laptops used to cost up to a couple thousand…
While dealing with the glare from the glass layer of the screen is another example of how screens have been improving over the years…
Never mind, you’ve also ignored how laptops have to deal with a lot more costly components… A Core i3/i5 processor can cost more than the entire internal BOM of a tablet by itself… and like also pointed out higher resolution puts higher load on laptops than tablets… So it’s not like system makers can just splurge on making the screens better without raising the cost of the rest of the system…
All without even considering how a lot of people who also try to compare tablets to laptops want even higher resolutions, even up to 4K with some even demanding 8K without really understanding what it really means to do so…
I could go on but I think I made my point abundantly clear by now!
You don’t have to like it but you do have understand it’s a lot more complicated than you’ve been trying to make it out to be and there are plenty of real reasons why things are the way it is for now…
I miss the Lenovo U-series Laptops. If i’m not mistaken, some of those have two hard drive spaces inside, so I’m definitely interested in getting one.
will they propose a 14″ version ?