Lenovo pledges "big initiatives" at the Olympics

Lenovo is to unveil a slew of products at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, starting next month.

The PC giant is the primary tech sponsor for the Winter Olympics and will supply PCs, servers and other IT equipment. The company will also remain the primary tech sponsor when the summer games go to Beijing in 2008.

Steve Dusi, director of marketing for the laptop business unit at Lenovo, said: "There will be a whole set of big initiatives at the Olympics."

Lenovo, which last year bought IBM's PC group, is also set to unfurl a new branding strategy and demonstrate how it will differentiate ThinkPad - the prized laptop line it acquired from IBM - from the existing laptops it sells, said Dusi.

The current ThinkPad line will keep the ThinkPad name worldwide, he added.

The company, which has most of its operations based in China, will begin to sell its own small business and consumer laptops, now sold in China, to emerging countries such as Brazil, India and Thailand. Until the IBM merger, Lenovo (formerly Legend) sold all of its products almost exclusively in China.

Those laptops are sold under Chinese brand names, such as Tinyi. Although Lenovo may change the names to appeal to new markets, Dusi strongly indicated they won't take the ThinkPad name. Instead, his company will maintain a "laser-like" focus on that brand for corporations.

He said: "We want to take what has worked there [China] and bring it to other parts of the world. The ThinkPad family of products on a global basis will be sold to large and mid-market customers."

Meanwhile, the company released new laptops - The ThinkPad X60 and ThinkPad T60 lines - at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. Lenovo said they consume less energy and weigh less than previous models.

The energy savings come in part through new circuit technology inserted by Intel - Core Duo processors, formerly code-named Yonah - but also because the chips get tasks done much quicker.

Sam Bhavnani, an analyst at Current Analysis, said: "There has always been a trade off between battery life and performance, and while dual core doesn't close the gap, it significantly narrows it."

Some models will come with built-in cellular capabilities. Lenovo has included technology that allows laptops to automatically switch from cellular connections to wi-fi and back, depending on the strength of the signal and the cost, Dusi added.

In addition, lower energy consumption allowed Lenovo to remove some cooling components, so many of the new models weigh about 11 per cent less than existing models.

The first members of the X60 and T60 lines will arrive this week, with more rolling out during the next two months.

According to Dusi, the company is keeping an open mind about inserting processors from AMD in ThinkPads - which are sold primarily to corporate accounts.

He said: "It is not going to be about speed. It is not going to be about cost. It is going to be about what will make the customer work more efficiently."

Michael Kanellos writes for CNET News.com