Mobile VoIP: Lenovo ThinkPad Innovations for VARs

I consider myself lucky – I love my job. I manage the team that shapes the future of Lenovo’s

March 18, 2011

3 Min Read
Mobile VoIP: Lenovo ThinkPad Innovations for VARs

By Lenovo Guest Blog 2

lenovo photo 2

I consider myself lucky – I love my job. I manage the team that shapes the future of Lenovo’s ThinkPad commercial laptops, and we’re bringing several new innovations to our upcoming 2011 line. We’re focusing on small details that collectively add up and really do make a big difference. We conducted what we call “voice of the customer engagements,” where we speak to, and more importantly, listen to, customers and potential customers. Their feedback went directly into requirements that have resulted in new innovations and improvements.

Here are some examples:

Voice & Video Conferencing (Or VoIP in techno lingo)

Being the technophile that I am, at the beginning of each year I decorate my cube with a poster that showcases one of the major technologies for the year. For the past several years , it’s been a toss-up between VoIP and wireless. This year, I’m going with VoIP again, but ask me in 2012, and my décor will likely be featuring wireless as networks mature.

VoIP poster

lenovo photo 1

However, for this year, we’ve put a lot of attention on improving our VoIP experience with:

  • Keyboard Noise Suppression. Our customers take notes, check e-mail, browse the web, etc. while on VoIP calls and want to reduce keyboard noise when they type. This new feature automatically senses when a user starts typing and reduces the noise of key clicks by suppressing the frequency of that noise.

  • Speakerphone capability. This automatically boosts a user’s voice if they move away from the PC so they sound closer to the microphone even if they physically aren’t.  With this new feature you can now toggle between this and Private Chat mode with ease to optimize your experience.  Private chat uses beam-forming technology to focus the dual digital microphones to pick up only the user in front the notebook and cancel out noise from the sides.  It’s what I like to call a “cone of silence” for your VoIP calls

  • Industry Leading VoIP Controls (both Hardware and Software). One of the Hardware features we improved with our latest evolution of our keyboards in 2009 is more emphasis and usability on multi-media controls.  We added a mute-mic button for quick access to muting your end of the call for those times when you need to only listen.  We’ve also provided a Function+F6 hotkey (picture below) to gain access to our Communications Utility 2.0 TVT.  From the software front, we’ve really dialed up VoIP improvements and control for our latest version of this Utility this year including quick controls to Hide My Video Image (a commonly asked for feature for those that conduct video conference calls!), Speakerphone and Private chat mode controls as well as access to advanced features that can take you into deeper levels such as automatically optimizing your audio for voice when a call is detected.

I hope you find these new features useful and encourage you to take full advantage of all of the details we’ve put in to offering you the best VoIP experience possible!

Tom Butler is director of Worldwide ThinkPad Product Marketing at Lenovo. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship. Read all of Lenovo’s guest blogs here.

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