CNET published a story today on the sustainability of the big-time PC manufacturers. They postulate that there will be fewer people shopping for new PCs, and fewer businesses making the leap as well.

CNET decided that HP would be best to survive the coming digital recession, citing that a full third of their revenue comes from software and enterprise storage. These mediums won’t be taking as big of a hit as consumer hardware, apparantly.

Dell is also in clear, having recently made a large move to services and software. The company also recently moved to China and India to cut costs, which should also help them survive.

CNET claims that Lenovo is in dire shape, having recently reported a quarterly loss of 78%. The company is doing well in China but not so well in the United States.

Click here for the full story.

Lenovo has announced their ThinkPad USB Portable Secure hard drive. It features a passcode system that uses a physical keypad. This should be useful for those who store sensitive information. The unit is just 3 x 5-inches, and is designed to pair up with ThinkPad laptops. It can have up to 10 unique user IDs and an admin account. The unit should be available by the end of the month. The 160GB model will cost $180 and the 320GB model will run $219.

The Sony laptop battery recall has hit 100,000, tripling in size since yesterday’s announcement that 35,000 were being recalled due to overheating problems. The recall now includes Li-ion batteries used in some Lenovo and Acer laptops as well as the original list of Dells, HPs and Toshibas. All of the recalled models were sold between 2004 and 2005, with two-thirds being sold outside of the US. Sony also noted that the faulty batteries were made by the same factory that produced a batch of recalled batteries two years ago.

China Mobile said no to HTC’s G1 Android phone and has opted to go with the Lenovo Mobile version instead. The device is said to be released in 2009 sometime in February or March. Not much else is known about the phone.

The announcement was made at the P&T/Expo Comm China 2008 in Beijing, by a Lenovo manager. Although in the west, Lenovo is mainly known for laptops, Lenovo is also known in china for manufacturing cell phones and smartphones.

An Ohio man bought a battery from Shentech for his ThinkPad and ended up with a fire and damaged laptop. After reporting this to Lenovo, IBM discovered that the battery was not the genuine IBM article it was made out to be. It then purchased 12 batteries from Shentech only to discover that all were fakes.

Enter the lawyers – IBM has filed suit against said company and has asked the court to force Shentech to hand over all of its batteries for destruction, profits it made from selling the fakes and US$1 million per counterfeit mark per type of item sold.

It’s about time someone took these profiteers of fake merchandise to task.