ThinkPad Reserve to deliver corporate warranty support to individual buyers

In an increasingly homogonous marketplace manufacturers are having to find unique services to separate their fairly similar looking hardware from that of the competition. To this end Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought out IBM’s notebook business two years back, is launching the ThinkPad Reserve Edition, a pretty bog-standard ThinkPad with a leather case and – more importantly – a near corporate level warranty.

The ThinkPad RE is basically a sexed up X60, coming with a configuration somewhere in the region of (though not yet totally locked down) a Core 2 Duo L7500 1.6 GHz processor with 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, the usual WiFi, Bluetooth and security extras in a 12.1” package. The machine will come with Vista Ultimate as standard, but a free downgrade to XP will be available after purchase.

The French leather case, crafted by Japanese saddle makers I’m informed, is what catches the eye first and marks the RE as a “Premium” product, but it’s hors d’oeuvres compared to the warranty, which is more the spuds and bacon to justify the $5,000 price tag.

The five-year warranty support comes in at a near-corporate level of service, with Lenovo promising to have an engineer on-site with you within four hours of making a service request. That four-hour response time applies to any country in which the RE will be sold – UK, Ireland, EMEA and China – and in any of the 166 countries where IBM, who will be providing the support, have operations, the response time is one day.

This warranty will appeal to heavy-duty users such as Managing Directors and people at CXO levels within organisations, who cannot afford more than a modicum of downtime in any given day. The looks are calculated to make it appealing to the generally rich and computer illiterate as well. Essentially you’re paying $5k for corporate service without needing to plonk down for several dozen units. It remains to be seen whether or not this will take off in the market, or how quickly its competitors will move in to offer the same on a wide range of products if this becomes a successful gambit.

The ThinkPad Reserve Edition is making the rounds on press tours as the ThinkPad celebrates its 15th birthday this year, and the main announcement with full details and pricing is expected mid-August.