You’ve heard of Lenovo, right? Chinese company . . . bought IBM’s Thinkpad laptop division back in 2005 – right, that one. Ah, but you still don’t know the half of it, as reporter Henning Steier of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung found out in Beijing:

Zu Besuch bei Lenovo in Peking: Wie die Chinesen den Smartphone-Markt aufrollen wollen und warum das schwierig wird: http://t.co/s4PMencv2l

March 25, 2013 11:06 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

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Henning Steier

In the first place, with a 16% worldwide market-share as of QIV 2012 Lenovo is contending head-to-head with Hewlett-Packard for top position as the world’s largest personal computer-seller. Granted, that is equivalent to fighting the last war, considering that PC sales are now in steady retreat (with the new Windows 8 operating system doing little to stem the losses, as Steier mentions).

Far more impressive is what Lenovo intends to do in the area of smartphones, which these days is truly where it’s at commercially. In fact, they already sell them – maybe you’ve never heard of products such as the company’s flagship K900 smartphone (pictured), but that’s because they have mainly been active in the Chinese market (25 million sold in 2012; #2 there behind Samsung). and in other non-Western lands such as Russia, India and Indonesia (soon to include Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria).

They will be coming to the US and European smartphone markets, to be sure, by 2014 at the latest. Get ready, because their ambition is to be at least #3 in smartphones worldwide within 18 months, and they will upping their yearly production of new models from last year’s 42 to do that. There’s even a rumor that they have their sights set on acquiring the ailing Canadian firm RIM, maker of the Blackberry; CEO Yang Yuanqing seemed quite annoyed when reporters at a Beijing press conference raised that possibility.

By the way, Lenovo sells phones using Android, but with three models coming out this year that run on the Windows Phone system. It also relies to a much greater degree than most other smartphone makers on Intel chips to power its devices – it already has a solid relationship with the California-based chipmaker for its computer business.

“I’m addicted to it,” President Obama reportedly told his interviewers on CNBC recently when they asked about his Blackberry. Still, could he be allowed to have it? The two presidents America has had so far during the Digital Age of e-mail and Internet – Clinton and Bush Jr. – famously had nothing to do while in office with e-mail and were never seen toting a mobile telephone. The concerns had to do both with the law (e.g. the obligation to preserve any written communications and the legal standing any messages might have) and with routine communications security.

On that latter point, at least, there might not be that much to worry about, according to a recent analysis in the German newsmagazine Focus (Blackberry security: The enemy in the telephone). The lede:

In contrast to his predecessors, US President Barack Obama may make use of a smartphone – but within strict limits. How insecure are Blackberry & Co.?

Not as insecure as you may fear, as it turns out, and that from German experience. As the article relates, back in June 2005 the auto-producer Audi decided to ban Blackberry use among its employees out of fears of industrial espionage by its competitors. The company was particularly concerned about the fact that all Blackberry e-mails are routed through the servers of RIM, the device’s Canadian manufacturer. But RIM was able to persuade Audi that this traffic was encrypted in such a way that even RIM itself could not break the code and read any messages – even if directed to do so by some government authority. Later, in response to a pronouncement by the German Office for Information Technology Security (in German, the BSI) that the Blackberry was too vulnerable for use by government officials who had to send secure communications, RIM managed to gain for its equipment a Common Criteria security certificate, basically meaning that a process of independent testing (presumably by the Standards Council of Canada) confirmed the Blackberry’s adherence to a very strict set of international security standards – strict enough, in fact, that Common Criteria certification was routinely recognized as good enough for any equipment to be allowed for German government use without further question. Late last year the prestigious German Fraunhofer [Research] Institute also was willing to certify the security of the Blackberry’s encryption, to a 24-million-year-before-cracking standard.

Alright, but what if the President loses his “Obamaberry”? (President Bush Jr. famously lost the watch off his wrist in an adoring crowd of Albanians, after all.) That’s also not really a problem; off-the-shelf commercial products are available today to mere-mortal users for powerfully encrypting the data on the machine, and no doubt US Government experts can take that at least one step further. (Plus, there is not supposed to be that much contact information on the machine in the first place, since it’s only supposed to be used for communication with engste Bekannte – “closest intimates.” Although I suppose Disney and various other youth-marketeers would love to get a direct line to Malia and Sasha.) The same considerations can be applied to the prospect of bugging, as well as spam and malware.