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RIM & Lenovo Team Up & Create Confusing Product: Lenovo Constant Connect, a Total Waste of 2 Years? You Decide…

by Ronen Halevy on Feb 17th, 2009 at 2:01 am EST
7 Comments »
 

RIM and Lenovo have teamed together to create a very confusing product they have spent 2 years developing. It is a ~$150 54mm ExpressCard which goes into your Lenovo Laptop and performs a very odd function. It will grab your most recent email from your BlackBerry over Bluetooth even when the laptop is off. That way your computer will always have the most recent email.

The card is essentially a Bluetooth radio with 500 Mb of storage and works with Outlook/Exchange, POP3, & Gmail. This might be cool if it would automatically let you use your BlackBerry as a tethered modem, but it doesn’t. From the wording of RIM’s press release, it will not even let you send email! The only use I can see for it is for attachments that open better on a laptop, otherwise this is a useless piece of… Who the hell is going to pay $150 to read email they already have on their BlackBerry? This will also tie up their Bluetooth connection and kill their BlackBerry battery and not letting them use a headset while on the go! Many workers who have $150 to spend and are mobile enough to justify a product like this probably already have a wireless data card built into their ThinkPad.

These kind of products make me wonder why RIM is not spending time on more useful projects instead of pipe dreams. Like speeding up the boot time of my BlackBerry. Or fixing the bugs on the Storm. Or finally releasing a truly stable Bold OS.

Engadget has a pretty good breakdown and video of it in action at this link. Personally, I am surprised that Engadget does not tear RIM a new one with this utterly useless product! I would have expected more from RIM & Lenovo.

So I have to ask. Can you guys think of one good use for this?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 and is filed under News.
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7 Comments to “RIM & Lenovo Team Up & Create Confusing Product: Lenovo Constant Connect, a Total Waste of 2 Years? You Decide…”

  1. Posted by: smiley
    February 17, 2009 at 5:23 am EST

    this is almost like the canceled Palm Foleo. basically it lets you sync the data from the handheld to desktop and you can edit document and stuff.

  2. Posted by: Ed
    February 17, 2009 at 6:33 am EST

    Sometimes product development people are allowed to exhaust their budgets in a vacuum.

  3. Posted by: DavidB
    February 17, 2009 at 7:39 am EST

    I suspect development on this idea was already a “sunk cost” before anyone high enough up at RIM to shxtcan it caught wind and realized just how dumb an idea this was.

  4. Posted by: Ronen Halevy
    February 17, 2009 at 7:51 am EST

    But seriously what were they thinking. This is just plain embarrassing… The funny part is that for $99 you may as well get the Bayalink now (1 year subscription)
    http://www.bayalink.com/home.asp
    Which lets you respond to emails and use your blackberry to go online

  5. Posted by: AdamG
    February 17, 2009 at 2:06 pm EST

    Thanks, RIM. You really have your finger on the pulse of your customer’s needs and wants. Much more useful than a native OTA Calendar/Contacts Sync for BIS users.
    I guess this is for reading html email on BES? Oh wait, 5.0 fixes that next month? Next project for you should be figuring out how to take the emails your just downloaded to your Lenovo card and put them back on the Blackberry device. Please don’t take longer than another 2 years.