It’s not quite Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it’s pretty close. Software developers and corporations are working on ways to give your smartphone split personalities: one dedicated to work and the other to play. The BYOD, or “bring your own device,” movement—along with the “open” nature of Android—is helping make dual-purpose smartphones a growing trend.

One of the benefits of BYOD is reduced overhead for companies because they can minimize or eliminate hardware and wireless plan costs. Encouraging employees to use their own smartphones can also reduce calls to the IT department, as employees generally have a better understanding of their personal devices than corporate-issued ones.

But with those benefits come significant risks.

Storing corporate data on a user’s personal phone puts that information in the crosshairs of any malicious software the user may encounter through the web or apps. And with app stores—particularly the Android Market—serving as veritable playgrounds for spyware and viruses, the need to protect corporate data on employees’ phones has become more important than ever.

So far, organizations have turned to mobile device management solutions to clamp down on the spread of malware and potential data leaks. But this approach often requires employees to grant their company’s IT department complete access to their personal devices, something most privacy-conscious users find less than desirable. That’s where split-personality or dual-profile software solutions comes in. Offered by companies including Enterproid and VMware, these new solutions separate a user’s smartphone into two profiles: one for work life and one for personal life.

The New Dual Mode

Here’s how the solutions generally work: When logged into your personal profile, you can use your smartphone just as you normally would, without worrying about whether someone from IT can see which apps you downloaded or websites you’ve visited. “It’s really helping with the privacy issue, because as an end user, I may not want IT to see everything I’ve downloaded onto my personal phone,” explained Stacy Crook, senior mobile enterprise research analyst with IDC market research. “It’s about a separation of the data.”

But it’s not just about privacy. The dual-profile approach creates a virtual barrier, ensuring that apps you download can’t interact with any important corporate data stored on your phone. These work profiles also give IT departments the control they need. Logging into your work profile also means you are automatically bound by the restrictions placed on your phone by IT, giving businesses the ability to lock down the app store, camera, and web browser. Log back into your personal profile, and you’ll have access to your phone’s features again.

Because the space is still in its infancy, there are only a few major players working on dual-profile solutions. Here’s a quick breakdown.

1. Enterproid

Although it was only founded in 2010, Enterproid recently teamed with AT&T to bring its Divide dual-profile solution to the carrier’s business users under the name Toggle. Toggle functions by creating a work profile on a user’s phone that can only be accessed via password. By default, you are automatically logged into your personal profile. Only after opening the Toggle app and entering your password can you access your work data. To help differentiate the two profiles, Enterproid has skinned the work side with Toggle-specific backgrounds and icons.

To get Toggle on your phone, you simply download it from the Android Market. Once it’s installed, your IT department connects your work profile to your company’s corporate server. From there, IT can let you download specific apps as well as updates for those apps to ensure you’re running the latest and most secure versions. The software gives IT the ability to wipe corporate information from an employee’s device and manage employee access to company resources.

Employees gain the ability to access their corporate e-mail, calendar, and other data. The software also features a set of native Android business apps. And because they run in your work profile, they are encrypted and compliant with your company’s use policies.

Enterproid CEO and co-founder Andrew Toy said his company jumped behind the dual-profile concept because “it enables companies to have what they want in terms of management and control and security. And on the personal profile, there is no effect whatsoever. The IT guys simply don’t have visibility in that area.”

According to IDC’s Crook, the Divide/Toggle solution is better suited for small and medium businesses because of its simplified method for dealing with BYOD. The one downside to Toggle, however, is that it only works on Android devices.

2.VMware MVP

Best known for its desktop virtualization software, VMware has teamed with Verizon Wireless to bring its Mobile Virtualization Platform to Verizon’s line of Android phones. The service puts a hypervisor on employees’ devices, providing access to a virtualized Android operating system. When logged into MVP, your company’s IT department can remotely manage and provision a corporate workspace on your Android device while leaving your standard Android operating system completely untouched.

“If I decide to go with the VMware/Verizon solution, I’m going to actually have two separate operating systems, one real and one virtual,” Crook said. Users can log into a virtual desktop where they can securely access corporate information. No information accessed through the virtual desktop can be saved or copied to a user’s Android profile either. All information is isolated from an employee’s personal profile.

While MVP and Enterproid offer similar services, they differ in how they are managed. “With AT&T it’s the same instance of the operating system that the data is operating on,” Crook explained. “With the Verizon solution, you are going to have a partition of operating systems. So you are going to have the base Android operating system where your personal information is going to sit and then you are going to have a virtual operating system where your corporate information is going to sit.”

Unlike Toggle, MVP is built into the kernel of a phone’s operating system. As a result, it will be limited to users who have phones with that kernel built in. But Verizon says it is already in contact with its Android OEM partners—including LG and Motorola—to have them include the software on their phones.

And while Toggle could work well for small and medium businesses, Crook told us that MVP is better optimized for an enterprise setting. That’s not to say it’s a better solution. But VMware already has the ear of the enterprise thanks to its other virtualization solutions.

3. BlackBerry Balance

RIM’s BlackBerry is synonymous with mobile enterprise network access. The company pioneered a solution for employees connecting to corporate data while away from the office. RIM is acutely aware of the BYOD trend’s growing momentum and has introduced its BlackBerry Balance service to meet that challenge. Like Toggle and MVP, the service separates an employee’s personal data from corporate data. But unlike those solutions, Balance doesn’t create separate work and personal profiles. Instead, Balance lives directly on a user’s smartphone and is accessible by IT through a standard BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

That, according to Crook, is a result of RIM’s decision to build the software directly into the BlackBerry BBX operating system. “It’s a micro-kernel architecture so there is all kinds of partitioning already going on in the OS that allows them to do the BlackBerry Balance model,” she explained.

With BlackBerry Balance, users are prevented from copying and pasting corporate information into their personal applications. IT can also remotely wipe business information from a user’s BlackBerry if he or she loses their phone or leaves the company.

Users also don’t have to open another program to access corporate data. If an action they are trying to perform isn’t permitted by IT, then they will simply see a blacked out box. For instance, if you try to copy something from your corporate e-mail to your personal e-mail, the copy command will be locked. But like VMware’s MVP solution and AT&T’s Toggle, BlackBerry Balance is limited to a set user base: BlackBerry owners.

Bottom Line

If there is one drawback to this dual-profile approach, it’s that it limits IT departments’ access to employees’ devices, making it a poor fit for industries dealing with extremely sensitive material. Healthcare and financial companies, for example, may need to take complete control of an employee’s phone if it stores sensitive information.

So which of these solutions is best? Because the BYOD market is still new—and dual-profile services are even newer—a clear leader has yet to be established. There are also several other solution providers looking to make some noise in this space, including OK Labs and Red Bend Software. One thing is for certain, though. More and more employees will want to bring their smartphones into the workplace, and businesses can either prepare now, or be left out in the cold.

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In response to a New York Times report about poor worker safety, last week Apple CEO Tim Cook sent his employees an internal memo stating that the company is a safety leader and would never, “stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain.” However, a representative with the Hong Kong-based Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), one of the organizations quoted extensively in the Times’ piece, said that Apple inspectors visited plants with serious safety problems, and they were not corrected until disaster struck.

According to SACOM Project Officer Debby Chan, Apple has a history of failing to address or being slow to disclose safety violations at its suppliers’ factories.  ”Apple staff know very well what’s going on at their suppliers. Yet, it is not the agenda of Apple to fix the problems,” she said.

According to Apple’s Supplier Responsibility website, the company has made an effort to improve worker safety at its suppliers’ factories. In fact, Apple began investigating its suppliers’ labor practices in 2007, performing 39 audits that year and increasing to an all-time high of 229 audits in 2011.

Still, Chan said that Apple took over 7 months to disclose the cause of a May 2011 explosion at Foxconn’s Chengdu plant that killed 4 workers and injured 18 when aluminum dust caused a fire on the iPad production line. She also claims that Apple inspectors had visited the plant and must have seen the poor safety conditions, but didn’t force Foxconn to correct them until after the accident occurred.  

“According to some Foxconn workers in Chengdu, they observed the presence of Apple’s representatives on the shop floor. A former manager at Foxconn also confirmed that Apple had representatives stationed in the factories to examine the quality and productivity of the products,” she said.

Following the explosion, Apple said it instituted several new safety measures in an effort to prevent similar accidents from occurring in the future. “Working closely with external experts, Apple audited all suppliers handling aluminum dust and put stronger precautionary measures in place before restarting production,” a statement on the company’s website reads. Safety enhancements include improved ventilation requirements, requiring suppliers to use explosive-proof vacuums, and ensuring that fire extinguishers are available to handle metal fires.

Chan also pointed to the 2009 poisoning of 147 workers at one of Apple’s display manufacturers, Wintek, and said that it went unreported until Apple released its 2011 supplier responsibility report, even though poisoned workers wrote three letters to then-CEO Steve Jobs.  She said she went to Apple’s Cupertino campus in June 2011, but was turned away when she asked to meet with an executive to discuss safety issues.

Chan contends that the changes Apple has made in dealing with suppliers – disclosing its suppliers list, joining the Fair Labor Organization, etc. – would not have occurred if it weren’t for public pressure put on the company and she urged consumers to demand more action.

“Without pressure from the public, especially consumers, Apple would not join the FLA and issue a statement in response to accusations of labor rights violations,” she said. “Therefore, consumers can contribute to better working conditions for the production workers.”

Apple is not the only electronics manufacturer to use Foxconn, but according to Chan, others have been more responsive to her group’s concerns. She said SACOM has met with HP and Nokia to discuss working conditions at the plants.

Reached for comment, representatives for HP said the company, “takes seriously the challenge of raising social and environmental responsibility standards in our supply chain and investigate any allegations of non-conformance to our supplier conduct code.”

Company reps further stated that HP, “has been auditing social and environmental responsibility performance in our supply chain since 2005 and to date we have conducted over 750 audits in supplier facilities around the world with an increasing number of our audits verified by third-party monitoring organizations.”

For its part, Apple says that its new relationship with the FLA will provide “a level of transparency and independent oversight that is unmatched in our industry” as FLA reps will be granted access to Apple suppliers’ facilities. Meanwhile, the company continues to increase its own audits each year. On its website, the company states that it has enlisted the help of internationally recognized experts to help identify issues with manufacturing practices at its suppliers’ factories.

“When we discover a problem — either during an audit or through one of Apple’s many onsite employees — we require immediate correction, and we look for ways to expand safety procedures and practices in all similar facilities. This way, we go beyond industry standards to improve health and safety across our supply chain,” the site says.

via NY Times, 9to5Mac

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The last two years have seen a slow but steady decline in the price for PC notebooks, with the average cost dropping from $530  in January 2010 to $456 in December 2011, according to U.S. sales numbers compiled by Market Research Firm NPD. Although a sharp drop to just $407 in November is undoubtedly due to steep Black Friday sales, the overall decline points to a glut of cheap laptops combined with user demand for the lowest priced systems.

The average U.S. notebook price overall, which includes Macs, has risen and fallen over the past 24 months but now sits at a much-higher $631, about the same average as in January 2010 ($635). Clearly, Macs have been able to hold their prices even as PCs have gotten cheaper and cheaper. The least expensive Mac notebook is still $999, while Best Buy alone sells two dozen PC notebooks for less than $400 on its website.

Deron Kershaw, a notebook market analyst for Gap Intelligence, said the decline in PC notebook prices is particularly impressive because most of the low cost systems are not netbooks. “It’s the 14- and 15-inch laptops being aggressively priced,” he said. “In the US retail channel, netbooks account for just 4.6% of all models now, compared to 15.4% last year.”

How much notebook can $456 buy you these days? Searching around the web today, we were able to find a number of sub-$456 notebooks with Intel’s 2nd generation Core i3 CPU on board. Bestbuy.com offers an Acer Aspire AS5742 with a 2.4-GHz Core i3 CPU, 15.6-inch screen, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive for just $399. HP is currently selling a 14-inch Pavilion G4 notebook with a Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and  a 500GB hard drive for only $454.99.

Although declining PC notebook prices may be good for the consumer, manufacturers are less thrilled. In the face of shrinking profit margins, manufacturers such as Acer, ASUS and HP are turning to Ultrabooks to buoy the average price of laptops.  

“The retail market continues to focus on high-volume SKUs, which right now are the $399-$499 full-size notebook segment,” said Stephen Baker, director of industry analysis at NPD. “The reason the industry is looking for Ultrabooks to be a game changer is to help stop this cycle and create a more stable market for mainstream consumer notebooks in the $500-$800 price range.”

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For years, the business world has belonged to Windows. As recently as 2008, technology research firm Forrester Research was telling companies that Windows PCs were the only machines they needed to worry about. Macs were a non-issue—but not anymore.

Today, organizations are openly accepting and deploying Macs on their networks. What’s more, Forrester Research has reversed course on its previous claim that the enterprise was no place for Macs, and is advising businesses to prepare for the coming Mac invasion, as more employees call on their employers to let them use Macs on the job.

According to the firm’s senior analyst David Johnson, 22 percent of companies surveyed have seen an increase in the use of employee-owned Macs. Yet, 41 percent of those firms don’t allow employees to access either their corporate network or email from Macs.

So how did Apple make so much progress in such a seemingly short amount of time? And how can IT mangers better manage Macs in a Windows environment?

iOS Halo Effect

Macs are gaining a foothold in the enterprise thanks to superior industrial design, fewer security headaches, and built-in Exchange support. But it’s also because iPad and iPhone users want to pair their devices with other Apple products.

“When people buy an iPad, it’s common for them to start considering a Mac next,” Johnson said. With an increase in sales and requests by employees to use MacBooks on a company’s corporate network, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies are necessary.

Just two years ago, requests to use Macs at work mostly originated from creative teams, but now the same corporations are fielding requests from all departments. “Executives, road warriors, sales reps, highly paid people, and high performers are the ones that have increased [the demand for Macs in the workplace] and we think that’s important,” Johnson said. Still, many corporations are woefully underprepared.

This has led some enterprising Mac users to develop workarounds to their companies’ network roadblocks, setting corporations up for some potentially dangerous security risks. As a result, analysts are urging businesses to get their networks ready and their IT departments up to speed.

Choose Your Inbox

The first—and perhaps easiest—step in bringing your Mac-loving employees into the corporate fold is by giving them access to your company’s email system. Microsoft Outlook is available for both Windows and Mac through Microsoft Office 2011 and provides comparable functionality. However, according to Johnson, there have been some complaints from Mac users about occasional stability issues.

IT managers can choose to save themselves a little coin and allow Mac users to use Apple Mail as their primary mail client. The software saw some major improvements with the release of OS X Lion, and can now be considered a viable alternative to a Microsoft Exchange server.

Like Outlook, Mail for OS X Lion includes threaded messaging, a two-column view, and message previews. And it’s free with OS X Lion. However, the software has some drawbacks, including an inability to view multiple users’ calendars at once.

Organizations have also turned toward web-based email offerings such as Google’s Gmail. Since the mail client is hosted in the cloud, it is platform-agnostic. As long as your employees have a web connection, they can access their corporate email. Gmail has the added benefit of allowing users to collaborate on documents in real time via Google Docs.

Business App Gap?

One of the biggest problems enterprises face in allowing employees to use Macs on the job is that many legacy applications are Windows-dependent. “We believe the typical organization has around one application for every 10 users and a little bit more than half of their applications require Windows to run,” explained Michael Silver, research vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner Research. “So if a 10,000-user organization has 1,000 applications and 500 of them require Windows and each user requires two or three random applications from these 1,000, making sure the user has the capability to access the application they need to do their job can be a little tricky.”

Moving away from Windows-dependent software, modernizing your infrastructure, and adopting platform-agnostic web-based programs running off of HTML 5 can go a long way toward making your network more Mac-friendly.

Unfortunately, legacy software seems to have a shelf life comparable to your average Twinkie’s. These aging programs are a major point of concern for the financial sector and engineers, as well as pharmaceutical and other industries. Some applications, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks, just plain don’t run on Macs, nor do they have a Mac-friendly equivalent.

Lean on the Cloud

The cloud is one place you wouldn’t expect compatibility between operating systems to be an issue. But that isn’t always the case. Take, for example, Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based enterprise productivity solution that allows employees to collaborate on projects online. While the web-based component of Office 365, known as Office Web Apps, is Mac-compatible, the offline component, Office Pro Plus, is not.

“The problem is they have maybe 20 percent of the functionality of Microsoft Office 365, so there are significant limitations to using just Office Web Apps,” Silver said.

Apple’s iWork productivity suite offers some compatibility with Microsoft Office, and with Apple’s iCloud employees can access their iWork documents from any web-connected Apple device. But just because iWork can read Office files doesn’t mean Office will read iWork files. “You’ll be saving your documents or exporting them and keeping them in the Microsoft format a lot if you are exchanging them with Microsoft Office users,” Silver said.

Google Docs and OpenOffice also serve as decent cloud-based productivity software offerings for Mac users. But, Silver pointed out, neither truly offers the kind of functionality that Office does. “They don’t have all of the features of Microsoft Office, and they certainly don’t have 100-percent compatibility [with Office].

Running Windows on Macs

If you’re a Mac user stuck on a Windows network, Apple’s Boot Camp lets you partition a section of the hard disk for use as a full-fledged Windows machine. The problem with Boot Camp is that it can’t run Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously, meaning every time employees want to switch between Windows and OS X, they’ll have to restart their machines.

Virtual solutions as Parallels and VMWare Fusion 4 have helped to alleviate this problem by giving users access to both a Windows and Mac environment at the same time. The Mac environment serves as the base operating system, while the Windows OS sits in a window on the user’s desktop.

However, each of these solutions requires a Windows license key to function properly and can put significant stress on a company’s IT department. That’s because each user running either of these solutions is working with two operating systems. “There’s a lot of overhead to this, although it’s certainly a good alternative,” Silver said.

Establish Security Guidelines

One common belief about Macs is that they are inherently more secure than Windows-based PCs. The truth is, Apple’s OS X is still vulnerable to Trojans and malware. “Organizations need tools to make sure employees’ Macs are as compliant with whatever their IT requirements are for security as Windows or any other device,” Silver said. Additionally, organizations should require Mac users to install identity and access software, as well as make sure their storage drives are encrypted,

“Macs don’t get a lot of viruses, but there are corruptions and other malware. Organizations should have anti-malware on their Macs, and then make sure that they’re patched and up to date. Organizations might use network access control products to try to understand what’s going on with the Macs on the network and make sure that they are compliant,” said Silver. Software such as Trend Micro’s Security for Mac provides enterprise-class protection against malicious software and can prevent users from accessing harmful web content.

At the same time, Johnson advises companies to temper their desire to completely lock down employees’ Macs. “In my opinion, the corporate PC—the Windows environment—in most companies is being far overmanaged. Most companies have said it’s enough to be able to do software delivery, to be able to do remote control, maybe some basic inventory, and being able to put an image on a Mac that’s standardized.”

Johnson says companies should above all be sure that any security software they install on employees’ Macs doesn’t degrade the devices’ best asset, their performance. “You don’t want to have anything that’s going to impact performance, and frankly, data loss prevention is one of the worst offenders, as is hard drive encryption in many cases.”

Prep for Tech Support

It may seem like a given, but before bringing Macs into your organization you’ll want to have at least one person on staff who has a comprehensive knowledge of the Mac environment. Having just a handful of Mac users won’t require you to bring in a specialist, though. Silver suggests that the typical IT technician-to-machine ratio is between 200 to 1 and 400 to 1. That means that the average organization would need somewhere between 200 and 300 Macs before it can justifiably hire someone to provide support specifically for Mac users. Johnson, however, pegs the number at a more manageable 130 employees.

If your company doesn’t have enough Mac users to warrant hiring another IT technician, Johnson said the next-best approach may be to establish a database of some of the most common fixes to Mac specific issues. SharePoint sites, he explained, can be used to provide employees with communal knowledge about using Macs in the enterprise.

Get Started

Waiting to get your network and IT department ready for Macs is a poor plan of attack. Your best bet is to begin planning now, because when your employees start clamoring to use their Macs on the job, they will expect that you have the ability to let them. And if you follow the above steps, you will.

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“We haven’t considered acquiring the firm and are not interested in (buying RIM),” said Samsung spokesman James Chung in an article today by Reuters. The story also says that Samsung has not been approached by the Canadian firm for a takeover and is not interested in licensing RIM’s mobile platform, contrary to the original speculation on the web yesterday.

That doesn’t mean that all hope’s lost for RIM. Other Asian companies like LG Electronics Inc, HTC and ZTE may be interested in what RIM’s offering. As such device-makers do not have their own platform, RIM could prove to be a useful prospective purchase, according to an unnamed source in the Reuters article.

RIM’s backpedaling stock direction is occasionally offset by jumps in its share price when rumors of takeovers abound. According to Bloomberg, the stock surged 8 percent after yesterday’s report.

Image provided by Shutterstock and Janina Dierks.

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A successful deal could help stall the decline of RIM, which has recently struggled to stay relevant in the wake of flawed business choices, a service blackout and weak product pipelines. Samsung, whose array of smartphones run on Google’s Android operating system, could benefit from the acquisition with strengthened market share and better email and messaging technology.

The potential deal is stagnating due to co-CEOs at RIM that are requesting too high of prices, according to the report. Despite a net worth of around $8.5 billion at RIM’s current share price, executives are looking for between $12 to $15 billion, BGR said. It’s an ambitious demand, given the fact that some consider the company to be overvalued as it is.

Fewer Americans are using BlackBerrys as the company fails to impress users. The share of U.S. mobile-phone subscribers in the three months through November dropped to 6.5 percent from 7.1 percent in the previous quarter, according to Bloomberg. RIM’s stock dropped 75 percent last year, but has seen intermittent jumps in recent months as investors speculate on possible takeover bids.

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Via BGR.

LAS VEGAS — Working from the road can be tough, as we’re finding during CES 2012. You’re in a strange hotel room, away from your family, and worst of all, you don’t have access to all of your office equipment. Luckily, Xerox is trying to making life a little easier. The company’s new battery-powered Xerox Mobile Scanner, announced at CES 2012, lets users scan color images and documents and wirelessly send then as JPG images and multipage PDF files to computers, mobile phones, tablets or cloud services.

Priced at $249.99, the 2 x 2.75 x 11.5-inch Mobile Scanner communicates with a PC, Mac, Android, iPhone, iPod or iPad, using Xerox’s free mobile app via Wi-Fi. The color scanner comes with a 4GB Eye-Fi SD card to automatically send photos to the web. Also included in the package are a carrying case, rechargeable battery and charger.

To send a file, users have to just turn the scanner on, choose either a PDF or JPG file format, and scan the document. Like other scanners in this class, it can read letter-sized paper, envelopes, receipts, business cards, photographs and transfer those files into readable docs on your laptop.

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Lenovo has just added a few more stallions to its stable of first-class business notebooks, including nine new versions of its ThinkPad Edge series and three editions of its B series laptops. One of these notebooks, the S430 is the first ThinkPad to offer an optional Thunderbolt port.

The 14-inch ThinkPad Edge E430 and ThinkPad Edge E435 come equipped with up to a Core i series processors or AMD Vision Accelerated series processor and as much as 8GB of RAM.Hard drive options range from a 320GB, 5,400 rpm drive to a 500GB, 7,200 rpm drive. Weighing in at 4.7 pounds and measuring  13.3 x 9.2 x 1.1 inches, the Edge E430 and Edge E435 get their graphics power from either an optional discrete Nvidia or AMD GPU with up to 1GB of VRAM. Both notebooks are swaddled in a soft-touch coating and available in a variety of colors including Midnight black, Heatwave red, Cobalt blue, or a simple brushed metal.

Need a bit more screen real estate? Then step up to the 15-inch ThinkPad Edge E530 or ThinkPad Edge E535. Both notebooks come equipped with the same hardware as their E430 and E435 siblings but come strapped with an extra inch of viewing room. But that added screen space means more mass. Both the E530 and E535 weigh in at 5.4 pounds and measure 14.8 x 9.6 x 1.1 inches.

ThinkPad Edge S430

If you’re looking for raw processing power in a lightweight package, then Lenovo’s ThinkPad Edge S430 may be the notebook for you. Equipped with an Intel Core i series processor, up to 16GB of RAM, and an optional Nvidia graphics chip with 2GB of RAM, this 14-inch powerhouse should be able to handle almost anything you throw at it.

Storage options include a 320GB or 500GB, 54,00 rpm hard drive; 320GB or 500GB, 7,200 rpm hard drive; or 128GB SSD. Heavy data users can choose to replace the S430′s DVD drive with an extra 1TB hard drive, bringing total storage space to 1.5TB. Connectivity options include three USB 3.0 ports and a Thunderbolt/DisplayPort. Measuring 13.8 x 9.37 x 0.87 inches, the S430 weighs in at a svelte 4 pounds.

ThinkPad Edge E130 / E135  and E330 / E335 

Available in select markets, the 11.6-inch E130 / 135 Series notebooks and 13.3-inch E330 / E335 notebooks offer an even slimmer form factor for small businesses. The model numbers ending in zero each have Intel Core Series CPUs while those ending in 5 have AMD processors. The E330 / 335  weigh just under 4 pounds while measuring 12.6 x 9 x 1.1 inches. The E130 / 135 weigh just 3.3 pounds and  measures a minuscule 11.3 x 8.3 x.85 inches. Both models have 1366 x 768 screens, a choice of hard drives or SSDs, and up to 8GB of RAM.

ThinkPad B Series

Lenovo also announced three additions to its B series of basic business notebooks. The 14-inch Lenovo B480 and B485 feature Intel Core i series or AMD Vision Accelerated processors, up to 8GB of RAM, and an optional Nvidia graphics chip with Optimus technology and 1GB of RAM or an AMD Radeon chip with 1GB of RAM. Available hard disk options include 320GB, 500GB, 750GB, or 1TB, 5,400 rpm drives or faster 320GB or 500GB, 7,200 rpm drives. Both notebooks weigh in at 4.8-pounds and measure 13.4 x 9.2 x 0.9 inches.

The 15-inch Lenovo B580 is available with an Intel Core i series processor, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia graphics card with Optimus technology and 1GB of RAM. Available storage options range from a 320GB, 5,400 rpm hard drive to a 500GB 7,200 rpm drive. The B580 measures 14.9 x 9.9 x 1.3 inches and weighs 5.2 pounds. Thanks to its larger size, Lenovo managed to fit a the B580 handy number pad.

Stay tuned for more from Lenovo at CES next week.

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If the men are asked to step aside, the position would be consolidated and taken over by board member Barbara Stymiest. An independent director, Stymiest was assigned to the board to evaluate it’s overall structure, including whether the company should have an independent chair rather than a leader director, and if it was necessary for Lazaridis and Balisillie to hold any significant board title, the Financial Post reports.

At 55, Stymiest is the former head of the Toronto Stock Exchange and previously served as the CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada. If appointed to the post, she would be the company’s first independent chair. This isn’t the first time, Lazaridis and Balisillie have faced calls for their resignation from their shared position, although it certainly seems to be the most serious.

RIM’s seemingly endless downward spiral has been punctuated with a series of severe setbacks including the abject failure of the BlackBerry PlayBook, which the company cancelled less than a year after its release. The company has also had to contend with a major service outage, which has drawn a class action lawsuit. Add to that the precipitous fall in RIM’s stock price, and it’s no wonder shareholders are up-in-arms over the company’s leadership.

• RIM’s U.S. Marketshare Drops Another 3.1 percent While Android Gains
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Research in Motion’s expedient descent into obsolescence may be taking place in a hastier manner than some expected. The maker of BlackBerry phones lost more subscribers in the month of November, pushing its market share in U.S. smartphones down to 16.6 percent of phones from 19.7 percent in the previous three-month period.

But as any pie-graph specialist will know, those 3.1 percentage points didn’t disappear – in fact, they cruised right over to Google, the developer of all things Android, according to the report, published December 29 by comScore. The search engine’s mobile platform remained the most used by U.S. cell patrons in November, with nearly 47 percent of the country’s subscribers owning Android-based smart phones.

Apple, the second-most owned platform with 28.7 percent of the market, rose from 27.3 percent last month.

This year has not been kind to the ‘rudderless‘ RIM, which has suffered some major setbacks in the form of email outages, delayed operating systems, lawsuits and precarious business horizons. A year ago, the company’s market share was just under thirty percent.

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