I don't think the ThinkPad division and the part of Lenovo that designs the K1 are the same. The ThinkPad team is at the Yamato facility in Yokohama. K1 is presumably in China, but I don't know.
I went to the ThinkPad center a few months ago. I did follow-up Q-n-A's with one of the engineers working on the ThinkPad Tablet. He would not go off message, though. No details would he spill. He would say nothing on the prevalence or source of the problems, nor whether they were software, hardware, limited to some production runs. Nothing. He just told me I should send my TPT to the service center for repair. I'm guessing this is what Lenovo headquarters have told those-in-the-know at Yamato to say to the public.
The personnel supervisor whom I orginally met was horrified at the stories she learned from me and reading the forums. She said, "The worst thing is, we had no idea that there was a disconnect between our customers and our support staff." Perhaps she was not in a position to need to know, so headquarters told her nothing. The engineers, though?
I don't know. It just doesn't make sense after this in my analysis or anyone else's that I've seen. Lenovo produced a product without fully testing the hardware; they sourced low-quality components (GPS chip, loose micro-USB port, and maybe camera), had QC miss shoddy construction (unsoldered, unattached power buttons, volume rockers). Then on the software side it seems similarly incompent. My camera selects its focus in a 1/4 second every time. All my other cmaeras spend more time searching for the edges in focusing. There is no way to hide the capacitive, soft-buttons even though we have hard buttons and constantly brush the soft buttons which the palms of our hands while writing or drawing, what the TPT was supposedly designed to do. They don't maintain a bug-tracking database of these bugs and others for all to see. What are they ashamed of?
Much of android development works on an open-source model. The commits and bugs are not hidden. They are pinned-down and squashed. Everyone, customer and competitor alike squash bugs for each other. IBM understands that. Lenovo seems to have no idea. "Don't you dare do anything to help our compoetitors (or admit the mistakes in the TPT1)!" It may be that distant managers in Bejing decide what smart engineers in Tokyo are to do and to talk abnout -- no dissent is tolerated.
It's just asking for trouble, in my opinion. Lots of blowback potential. And it is certainly tarnishing the ThinkPad brand Lenovo paid so dearly for. Such a waste . . .
¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸ Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 1838CTO (not rooted, from Lenovo Direct Japan); WiFi-only model (w/ Galaxy Note LTE as tether); 64GB system memory with Transcend 64GB Class 10 SDXC card; ThinkPadTablet_A310_02_0039_0090_JP rom; GPS works (slowly) after 2012/04 return (power button had broke); Camera will not focus. (note: I have not re-tested these since the ICS update 2012/06/21) ¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸
