May 8, 2012—Lenovo Group launched the K-series Lenovo Smart TV products for the China market at a press conference in Beijing today. With today’s announcement, Lenovo is now offering products across all four screens — personal computer, tablet, smart phone and smart TV — that define the company’s long-term “PC-Plus” strategy.
Lenovo believes that the PC industry has entered the PC-Plus era, characterized by the emergence of a variety of new devices. Smart TVs, tablets and smart phones all have the same computing, storage and network communication capabilities of a PC, offering a wide variety of features and apps based on the Internet. In the mean time, PC itself will also be continuously adapted and innovated.
“While we continue to strengthen our position in the PC industry, we are also further expanding into the field of Internet devices, with innovative smart phones and tablets, and today, smart TVs,” said Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Group Chairman and CEO. “As a global leader in the PC industry, our customers look to us to provide new technologies, and as we drive further into the PC-Plus era, we will continue to introduce new products worldwide. The PC-Plus era is a great opportunity for our customers and Lenovo intends to remain out in front, leading as always with exciting new products.”
Liu Jun, Lenovo Senior Vice President and Mobile Internet Digital Home President said, “China’s smart TV market will experience explosive growth in 2012, and Lenovo is poised to give customers in China the technology that they want. Today we are introducing a smart TV product that went through three generations of R&D, and many more times as much customer feedback. With our excellent products and rich content and apps, we want to give users an outstanding experience and make smart TV a new place for families to happily gather together.”
As the first television product to adopt the Android 4.0 OS, Lenovo Smart TV employs the powerful Qualcomm dual core 1.5GHz CPU. Supported by Lenovo’s R&D capabilities combining a “trinity” of software, hardware and cloud services, Lenovo Smart TV delivers three major innovations to the user experience.
- The first is a user-friendly interactive system, like the simple and intuitive “Sandwich” User Interface that integrates touch, voice, air mouse, gravity sensor, smart keyboard and traditional television remote control in a “Six in One” Smart Remote Controller.
- The second is high-quality video on demand. Lenovo and SMG’s BesTV established joint venture ISmartv to exclusively provide users with customized online HD video resources that already amounted to more than 300,000 hours of viewing.
- The third is a wide variety of applications based on an open platform. With its Le Store app developer community, Lenovo has already developed over 1,000 custom apps for its smart TV covering games, education, SNS, life service and many others.
Lenovo is releasing four Lenovo Smart TV K-series devices — the 55-inch screen K91 and K81 and the 42-inch screen K81 and K71 — priced from RMB14,999 to RMB6,499. In the future, Lenovo will release new product lines to satisfy the demand of various user segments.
Starting from May, Lenovo Smart TV is going on sale in Suning stores in nine cities—Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Through its close relationship with IT and appliance channel stores and its own strong PC channels, Lenovo will establish a wide variety of sales channels for its smart TV. These include national and regional appliance and 3C stores, self-operated Lenovo stores and online sales.
Lenovo established an improved integrated service system exclusively for its smart TV products. The company will provide customer service through online service channels, a service hotline and physical service stations. Customers are allowed to receive free servicing twice on their Lenovo Smart TV, which includes on-site assembly, tuning and demos.
Lenovo Group chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Group senior vice president and Mobile Internet Digital Home president Liu Jun, Lenovo Group senior vice president and Lenovo China president Chen Xudong and other senior-level Lenovo management, Qualcomm senior vice president Luis Pineda, RTS and BesTV New Media Co. Ltd. vice chairman Zhang Dazhong, and other high-level Lenovo partners from Philips, LGD, Monotype, Sina and Game Loft all attended the press conference.
Attached: Partner stance on Lenovo Smart TV:
Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul E. Jacobs
Lenovo Smart TV is the first smart TV in the world to adopt the Snapdragon™ Xiaolong processor, as well as the first to run on Android 4.0 OS. This excellent smart TV product is an accomplishment resulting from an extraordinary partnership — it combines Lenovo’s insights in personal computing and consumer electronics with Qualcomm’s expertise in mobile, computing and other multimedia fields.
SINA Corporation president and CEO Chao Guowei
Lenovo, a leader in China’s IT industry, has leveraged the strengths of its product technology and major advantages over the course of many years in the PC field to develop and introduce its smart TV today. I believe that this will have a wide-reaching influence on the entire industry. Sina has developed the first TV-app – Sina Weibo TV – exclusively for Lenovo. This will allow users to discover and share their favorite content and interact with the TV programs they watch all without leaving their home.
About Lenovo
Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) is a $US21 billion personal technology company – and the second largest PC company in the world, serving customers in more than 160 countries. Dedicated to building exceptionally engineered PCs and mobile internet devices, Lenovo’s business is built on product innovation, a highly efficient global supply chain and strong strategic execution. Formed by Lenovo Group’s acquisition of the former IBM Personal Computing Division, the Company develops, manufactures and markets reliable, high-quality, secure and easy-to-use technology products and services. Its product lines include legendary Think-branded commercial PCs and Idea-branded consumer PCs, as well as servers, workstations, and a family of mobile internet devices, including tablets and smart phones. Lenovo has major research centers in Yamato, Japan; Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, China; and Raleigh, North Carolina. For more information, see www.lenovo.com.
