[Thinkpad Tablet General] timmyDean:
I can give you my opinion. We develop software for commercial clients and government and we write drivers for these devices. Unfortunately, most of our business clients want an application that cannot be removed by employees and has all the social networking stuff removed. My NDA does not allow me to say exactly what. But, let me give you an example: Lets say a hospital was looking for a hand held device for reading and signing medical records with an interface to medical equipment. Or traveling salesmen, a delivery driver having someone sign for a package. An application you load on your teenagers device to determine how fast they are moving, etc. Anyway, the list goes on and this is just the business side of it. But you get the picture.

Now, I have a real business need to root every tablet on the market therefore I can tell whomever buys our application that they can buy any tablet they want. Some applications only require root so we can install it so it cannot be removed and we delete the stuff the company doesn't want employees using (like Netflx, Facebook, etc). Or, if the software needs to interface with a particular piece of hardware, we flash a new ROM with custom hardware drivers in the kernel to interface with a particular piece of medical equipment.

So, myself along with other programmers working the business side of it stay away from Lenovo because from the start they lock the bootloader making it difficult to develop for. So we tell ever business to stay away from them.

Then you have individuals like myself that program on their own and I want to tweak something myself. So, when I look around for a tablet to develop on, I look for one that makes it easy to flash(or root). For example, currently my favorite is Motorola Xoom (not the FE) because you can simply unlock it.

So, everyone I know writing business applications stays away from Lenovo or anyone looking to develop a custom ROM as well. Lenovo did come in and meet with management, last year, and what they wanted to sell us was a custom solution. So, they were more than happy to work with us to build a solution. But, we cannot sell something and then tell the buyer that they have to buy a special tablet from Lenovo.

story:

So, what started all this for us, was we were working on a big sale to a Fortune 500 Insurance company and they wanted to use Lenovo. Their IT person loved them. Management in a haste, bought me a K1 to load and play with (mostly because it was cheaper than the TPT or ignorance I guess). So, when I got it, I loved it. And at first it was unlocked. Then the real horror started.

I told management how great the K1 was and within days we had the K1 loaded with the insurance application. They came in, we sold them, I got a bonus and life was good. Then we took an OTA, and the Insurance company started ordering K1's and TPT and to our surprise NOTHING WORKED because Lenovo went to a locked bootloader (Note: The org K1 had root(#) access by default when you connect to it via adb shell and we had not tested it on the TPT).

As you can imagine all hell broke loose. That's when we discovered Lenovo's position on things. During the meeting, I asked them why they locked it. They replied, because they are offering a consumer solution with the K1. It is not just hardware but software (in other words they want to make money off all the bloatware they load) and that the TPT was their business solution. If we partnered with them, we could do what we wanted on a secure platform (then they went on and on about how we really need their solution because you cannot root it, it's secure, blah blah blah).

Anyway, I had to fly out (along with the suits) to the insurance company. I personally meet with their CIO and convinced her that 'Lenovo' could NOT be trusted and if she insisted on using the TPT that we would now have our hands tied to Lenovo. I showed her several other tablets that were just as good and cheaper. She put a pencil to it and realized that she could be the hero here saving the company money. So, she kissed Lenovo good buy and went with another tablet.

Anyway, my story, take with it what you want.

TD

---------- Post added at 05:18 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:41 PM ----------

Let me further add something. A Kindle Fire is a great little tablet, but it is designed specifically to access Amazon. It is an extension of Amazon's business. There are others too. But, the Kindle is the most known.

So, these are NOT really tablets being designed to run everything. They are designed to sell services. For example, the Kindle Fire is to sell and expand Amazon services.

The Lenovo products are the same thing. They are designed to expand Lenovo's services. They want you coming to their Marketplace, using their services. In other words, they want to make money not only off selling the hardware, they want to make money off the software and services.

You can read some articles on the net about company's saying there's no money in hardware sales. This is why HP stopped making tablets and wants to become a software solution provider. This is what Lenovo is trying to do. If they sell you a tablet and make $10 profit it's not the same as $10 plus another $30 for applications you use.

That's what's going on here. It's not that they are evil not wanting you to brick your device, void your warranty, and then you want them to fix it. They are going after the services and they believe that's where the money is. Locking the boatloader is just their attempt to keep you locked into their services.

History lesson: If you believe you should learn from history then if you go back to the late 70's and early 80's, you will see the same thing. If you had bought brand xyz then you had to only buy xyz's printer, if you wanted to print. I remember buying floppy disks just to find out that they weren't compatible. Can you imagine that happening today? You buy a blank thumb drive and discover it doesn't work on your Lenovo, it only works on HP.

What changed all this was MS. So, if you're a believer in history repeating itself then Windows 8 will revolutionize the tablet and phone market. Google has realized the threat and is why they are pushing ICS and trying to stop the fragmentation. However, this does not stop Lenovo locking the bootloader and forcing you to go to their Marketplace. However, under Windows 8 this is going to be harder to do.

TD