Lenovo Dives Into The Tablet Market.

Lenovo announced its foray into the tablet market. Three Android tablets were launched, which included one business and two consumer tablets in 7" and 10" form factors.

The ThinkPad tablet brings Lenovo's enterprise expertise to the emerging segment, and is targeted at corporates seeking better encryption and and security standards. This is hot on the heels of Cisco's Cius, another business tablet launched last month. The device is well appointed, with a 1 GHz dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor at its heart. The display is an IPS panel reinforced with Corning's Gorilla Glass. A pressure-sensitive stylus is the main USP of the ThinkPad tablet, while Lenovo has incorporated handwriting recognition to complement the input device.

The 10" ThinkPad bears a full-size USB port that allows users to connect USB peripherals (a USB file copy app is preinstalled), in addition to an SD card slot, mini-HDMI, and micro-USB ports. Moreover, the port allows it to be connected with a keyboard dock as well. The tablet weighs in at 730 grammes and is 14 mm thick. Looks-wise, it seems Lenovo has finally managed to make tablets ugly with its ThinkPad range.



The consumer range includes the 10" IdeaPad K1 and 7" IdeaPad A1. The former runs Android 3.1 (Honeycomb), while the latter is preloaded with 2.3 (Gingerbread). The K1 features a pair of 2 and 5 MP (front and rear) cameras, while the A1 bears a VGA camera at the front and a 3 MP one at the rear. The K1 sports the same dual-core Tegra 2 found in the Thinkpad, while the A1 is powered by a 1 GHz single-core processor. The K1 is preloaded with 40 apps for users to start swiping away at right out of the box. Optimised apps are available from Lenovo's own App Shop, in addition to over 250,000 apps already existing in the Android Market.



All tablets will feature Flash 10.2 support and expansion slots to increase storage capacity. The ThinkPad tablet range is priced at Rs 30,000 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi, Rs 42,000 for the 32 GB 3G+Wi-Fi, and Rs 47,000 for the 64 GB 3G+Wi-Fi model. The IdeaPad K1 ships in two 32 GB variants costing Rs 30,000 and Rs 34,000 for the Wi-Fi and 3G+Wi-Fi models respectively. Finally the 7" IdeaPad A1 retails at Rs 15,000 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi version.