Booming Sales Drive Lenovo to #2 PC Spot

Lenovo recorded booming PC sales for the fourth quarter, almost ten times the rate of the PC industry, the company said. 

Lenovo's notebook PC sales for the fourth quarter topped $4.2 billion, representing 44 percent growth over the same period a year ago. Desktop sales also increased 43 percent to $2.4 billion. Both represented increases of almost nine times that of the rest of the industry. 

Lenovo's PC business was the fastest-growing among the top four PC vendors, and the company's sales have propelled it to the second spot worldwide, the company said, behind HP. Lenovo also claimed it has become the number two tablet provider in China, and number four in the world. 

The robust growth drove profits attributable to equity holders to $67 million, a 73 percent increase over the same period a year ago. Sales grow 37 percent to $7.50 billion. For the fiscal year, Lenovo recorded sales of $29.6 billion.

"During the fourth fiscal quarter, Lenovo was the fastest growing among the top PC vendors in Global Emerging Markets, and Commercial Markets, as well as Consumer Markets and Mature Markets, where for the first-time ever, we reached double-digit market share in both," Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo's chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. "We furthered our leadership position in the Global Emerging Markets, in which Lenovo already achieved double digit-market share in 15 markets and became number one in India. With the emergence of multiple devices such as smartphones, tablets and smart TV, our industry is entering the PC + era. Lenovo is focused on leading the PC industry, and building upon that leadership in the PC+ era." 

Lenvo recently launched a "new family of ThinkPad notebooks, with new designs and Intel's new "Ivy Bridge" third-generation Core processors. They include the ThinkPad X1 Carbonand the ThinkPad X230 Tablet.

  Nvidia's Serves Up 'Kai' Platform for $199 Android Tablets

Nvidia is wooing tablet makers with a new platform for a Tegra 3-based tablet running Android Ice Cream Sandwich that could theoretically be priced as low as $199, but is even more excited about opportunities in the tablet space that will emerge when Windows 8 is released. 

The graphics chip maker introduced an Android-based tablet platform code named Kai at its annual stockholders meeting held during the GPU Technology Conference last week. First spotted by The Verge, Nvidia's vice president of investor relations Rob Csonger walked investors through the company's plans for using "the secret sauce that's inside Tegra 3" to deliver a quad-core tablet at a price matching the Amazon Kindle Fire's by the end of the year (see Kai introduced at the 33:20 mark of this webcast). 

"Last year, our tablet strategy was one of the areas ... we would have liked to have gone a little bit differently. It took a little while to develop some good tablets and I think those tablets were priced a little bit more expensively than the market could bear," Csonger told Nvidia shareholders. 

The graphics chip maker released its third-generation Tegra System-on-a-Chip last November and it was used by Asus in the Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet-laptop convertible introduced in December. 

The Transformer Prime is currently priced at $499. Csonger said Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire, while delivering "disappointing performance," had pointed Nvidia in the direction of pricing that would be more attractive to tablet buyers in a market where Apple's iPad is the runaway winner at the high end. 

"So first of all, our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market for a $199 price point," Csonger said. 

"The way we that we do that is with a platform that we've developed called Kai," he continued. "So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that's inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost by using a lot of innovation that we've developed to reduce the power that's used by the display and to use lower cost components within the tablet." 

Csonger went on to say that Nvidia was actually even more excited about the possibilities for Tegra 3-based tablets built for Windows 8, Microsoft's next-generation operating system due out later this year. 

"Probably the most exciting opportunity for us, however, in the tablet space is a discontinuity and a disruption that's going to occur in the PC world, which is the end of the Windows and Intel, or Wintel monopoly," he said. 

"At the end of the is year, Microsoft is releasing Windows 8 with a new capability, Windows RT, and the ability here to run Windows on ARM is a very big opportunity for Nvidia. Whereas in the phone space, we are moving into the phone space and there are incumbents there, when it comes to Windows and PCs, welcome to Nvidia's home court. This is something we know very well and have done for many years."

AT&T to Offer Prepaid Samsung Galaxy Appeal Smartphone

AT&T today unveiled the Galaxy Appeal, the carrier's first prepaid side slider smartphone.

The $149.99 Samsung smartphone will be available at Walmart starting June 5 and in AT&T stores on July 15.

The device is AT&T's first prepaid smartphone with a slider QWERTY keyboard. It features a 3.2-inch touch screen and runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread. There's a 3-megapixel rear-facing camera with 3x zoom and video capture at 24 frames per second.

The Appeal comes with 512MB of internal memory, expandable up to 32GB with a microSD card. It will run an 800-MHz Qualcomm MSM7225A processor.

Data plans will be available via AT&T's GoPhone program. Users can opt for 1GB of data for $25 per month, 200MB for $15, or 50MB for $5 per month. All data packages are available on the $50 Unlimited Talk & Text nationwide plan for GoPhone smartphones and the $25 Unlimited Text with 250 minutes nationwide GoPhone plan, AT&T said.

AT&T's other Samsung Galaxy devices include the smartphone-tablet hybrid (or phablet) Galaxy Note, as well as the popular Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Tab tablet.

Next up on the Galaxy lineup is the Galaxy S III, which hits Europe on May 29. U.S. carriers have not yet been announced, however, so it remains to be seen if AT&T will offer the coveted 4G LTE smartphone. You could always order an unlocked Galaxy S III, but the devices are currently running about $800 - without LTE. For more, see PCMag's Hands On With the Samsung Galaxy S III and the slideshow below.

Microsoft: Windows 8 Boots Too Fast for Mere Mortals

Windows 8 boots so fast, users will likely not have time to trigger the boot menu before the PC boots, Microsoft claims.

In a blog post this week, Chris Clark, a program manager on the Windows User Experience team, again claimed that Windows 8 will boot in less than 7 seconds on a PC equipped with a sold-state drive. 

In older PCs, users have had plenty of time to hit the F2 or the F8 key and trigger a boot menu before the machine POSTs, and could use that menu to run diagnostic tools and boot from alternate devices. With Windows 8, that "window" to push the F8 key is less than 200 ms, Clark wrote, fast enough that even a gamer might be hard pressed to hit the correct keystroke in time. 

Instead, Microsoft had to come up with some alternative methods of getting to the boot menu. 

In Windows 8, users will automatically be taken to the boot menu in the case where Windows can't boot - even in situations where Windows thinks it can, such as in the case of a faulty display driver. In that case, the boot options menu is presented. 

Users can also manually access the boot options. The primary method of doing so, Clark explained, is from the Advanced startup on the General tab of PC settings. Users can get to PC settings from the Settings charm, or by searching from the Start screen using specific search terms, such as boot, startup, safe mode, firmware, BIOS, or several others, he wrote. 

Probably the most common way of reaching the boot options menu, however, will be clicking and holding the SHIFT key while choosing the restart option, in much the same say that sleep and hibernate options can be selected under older Windows PCs. 

 "The reason that we added this Shift+Restart option to the shutdown menu was because the boot options need to be available even when no one has signed in to the PC," Clark wrote. "In the old hardware model that allowed keystrokes in boot, anyone with physical access to the PC could press a key to interrupt boot and use the available boot options. To preserve those scenarios, we needed a way for someone who hasn't signed in (but is still physically using the PC) to use the boot options menu.

Yahoo! Axis: A New Way to Search

Wouldn't it be great if you never had to look at a bunch of links after doing a Web search, so that instead you'd just land on the site you were looking for? What if Google's I'm Feeling Lucky Choice always worked perfectly so that you didn't have to pore over ten blue links? Yahoo today made new search tools under the Yahoo Axis moniker that attempt to enable that worldview, called Yahoo! Axis.

Yahoo Axis comprises iOS apps and browser plugins for the four major Web browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Android apps will follow later this year. The way they work is notable for its simplicity, and the search experience is especially suited to tablets such as the iPad, because of its use of swipe gestures.

As with any other search utility, you start with a search box. And as with all modern search sites, you'll see suggested search proposals drop down as you type. But what happens next is new: A filmstrip-like view across the top of the screen shows large thumbnails search result pages. Tapping on one opens the page in full screen. Swiping takes you to the next result.

For some searches, like weather, you'll see relevant information in a box as you type. The Axis app serves the function of a full Web browser, with tabs implemented as large thumbnails that appear when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen. The desktop browser plugin works similarly, except result previews show up across the bottom of the window. The browser plugin sports favorites and recent search syncing, and unlike browser-specific syncing, it works with any browser you install the plugin on as well as with the Axis mobile apps.

Another key feature for Yahoo Axis is that search sessions are synced from one of your devices to the rest. So if you started a search on your desktop or iPad, the next time you open Axis on your smart phone, you'll see a "Continue from iPad" choice on the phone. The interface also has Favorites that serve as visual bookmarks, and Read Later sections for easy access from any device. The apps also let you share via email, Twitter or Pinterest.