There’s no shortage of tablets to consider for holiday shopping this year, though arguably only a few offer features and performance worthy of the price tag. Now Engadget has word that a new Lenovo 10.1″ tablet should hit retail before 2012. It’s not the first Lenovo tablet on the market, but it’s got some goodies that the IdeaPak K1 and the ThinkPad Tablet are missing, including the Ice Cream Sandwich OS (Android 4.0), and NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 T33 processor. According to Engadget’s anonymous source, the new tablet will also come with 2GB RAM, a USB port, a back-facing camera, a “Special Fusion-Skin Body” and a fingerprint scanner.
I find myself interested in Lenovo again after reverting to a Lenovo X220 laptop earlier this fall. It’s a competent brand in computing that you’d think could create a decent tablet competitor. Unfortunately, the reviews on early Lenovo tablets aren’t stellar – certainly not good enough to make them truly competitive with the iPad or lower priced offerings like the Kindle Fire or the new Nook Tablet. My hope is that Lenovo takes a step up with its Ice Cream Sandwich debut. Better navigation options (including a handful of physical buttons), stylus-driven input (with better handwriting recognition) and business-friendly features like a longer battery life and strong syncing features could create a standout product. Here’s hoping.
Funny you should mention Lenovo reviews this AM… been looking for some Ideapad A1 reviews for comparison to the Fire and Nook. Looks like lesser processing, but dual cams and Android Market for equivalent pricing. Hm.
I’m thinking the new Asus Transformer looks more interesting than most of the other options. Thin and light, nice materials, good battery life, great keyboard dock option that improves battery life even more. Pointless CPU power (that probably still won’t cure the scrolling stutter all Android tablets seem to have…).
Of course the one I actually bought was a Kindle Fire, primarily for the $199 price tag. Given that we already have an iPad, but are already invested in the Amazon ecosystem, it seems like a reasonable choice. Might regret it soon enough, but its not that much money to toss down the toilet, whereas a largely unused $499 iPad would just be a tragedy…
From the reviews I’ve seen the new 8.9″ Tab is the size everybody should be copying though apparently not enough companies seem to feel that way…
Yeah, absolutely – high powered, sleek, and with the keyboard its practical (if no longer cheap). The reviews of the Fire depressed me – seems not only did Amazon rush the hardware (someone else’s hardware), they rushed the software. I assume they’ll tighten it up over time, but I’m no longer interested. (We have a lightly used $350 refurb iPad.)