Lenovo and Research in Motion, makers of Blackberry phones, have joined forces to offer “Lenovo Constant Connect” which will allow us to receive emails sent from our BlackBerry phone even when our Lenovo ThinkPad is turned off. Cool!
If you’re in the US then it will be available before summer but everyone else will have to wait a bit longer as it won’t be available until later in 2009.
Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Chief Executive said “with more and more mobile professionals relying on both their BlackBerry SmartPhone and ThinkPad laptop PC, we view better integration between the two devices as a necessity”.
By now you must be wondering what the catch is? Well there’s none really except that you’ll have to buy the Constant Connect ExpressCard which will set you back about $150.
But, we have no idea how easy the installation is likely to be. Apparently all you have to do is follow the instructions and use the card to pair the phone and the laptop together using Bluetooth features.
I don’t mean to be cynical but we already have the facility to connect our laptop to the internet via Bluetooth wireless technology and this can be quite a tricky process, ok so our laptop must be on to do it.
If this new feature can installed without too much hassle, and I hope it can, emails will automatically be transferred straight to the laptop even if the laptop is turned off. How?
Simply by the low power “always on” ExpressCard of course! If the laptop is off, new emails are stored in flash memory.
If you want to send emails and you don’t have an Internet connection, then you can do that via the BlackBerry’s 3G feature. No more paying fees for Wi-Fi when on your travels. Pretty clever eh?
Jim Balsillie, Research in Motion chief executive states “by leveraging the industry-leading push-based connectivity of the BlackBerry solution, Lenovo Constant Connect will simplify email synchronisation on the laptop, and provide mobile professionals with greater flexibility to manage their email on the move”.
Sounds pretty good to me so far!
Oh, forgot to mention, to begin with it will only work with Microsoft’s Outlook but Lenovo are working on supporting Lotus Notes too. You also have to have a pretty recent ThinkPad machine, like one that was made in the last year for example, but BlackBerrys made in the last few years should be fine.
Personally I must admit I quite like the idea of flipping open my laptop to write a quick email without going to the bother of setting up a connection first. That’ll do me.
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Cool, two of my favorite tech brands!