Lenovo is clarifying its launch plans for the ThinkPad Tablet, which is the company’s first Android tablet aimed at business users. When Lenovo unveiled the tablet earlier this month officials promised it would be available in the US in August. Now the Lenovo website has a more precise date: August 23rd. The tablet will ship internationally during the third quarter of the year.
The Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet has a 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display and dual core NVIDIA Tegra processor. It will be available with up to 64GB of flash storage and the tablet runs Google Android 3.1.
If those specs sound pretty much par for the course, that’s because they are. I could have just described virtually any Android tablet released this summer. But Lenovo will also offer a few premium features, such as an optional digital pen for taking handwritten notes or for drawing and an optional Folio keyboard case which features Lenovo’s TrackPoint system with a pointing stick in the center of the keyboard instead of a traditional touchpad for controlling an on-screen mouse cursor.
The tablet has a Gorilla Glass IPS display and measures 10.3″ x 7.2″ x 0.6″ and weighs just under 1.6 pounds. The ThinkPad Tablet will have a starting price of $479.99.
it’s not a regular trackpoint. it’s an optical trackpad, lie the ones we’ve seen already on a few phones. lenovo couldn’t fir an actual moving nubbin’ in that very slim keyboard.
Trackpoint! * mashes a buy button that doesn’t exist *
gawd how come everyone who mentions these on their sites, never NEVER mention that its he first android honeycomb tablet to be able to run the netflix app…. thats almost the biggest sell point for me, that plus it has a full complement of ports, and lenovo was rated most reliable for their hardware
Because the IdeaPad K1 was actually the first with Netflix support and it’s already available for purchase… and because the Netflix app actually works on a variety of other tablets, it’s just trickier to install for now — but it will probably show up in the Market for those devices soon as well.Â
Also… because it was mentioned when the tablet launched, but doesn’t necessarily bear repeating every single time the device is mentioned.Â
Heck, I don’t even mention the optional keyboard dock every time I mention the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, even though the name of that tablet doesn’t really make any sense without the keyboard.
I much rather run a normal Linux distro on that thing. I don’t think Android is quite there for me yet… Do they have any good editors?
You’ll probably start seeing more linux offerings once the next gen ARM offerings come out. Anything up to Tegra 2 is still slower than a netbook, with the Tegra 2 being one of the first to run Ubuntu at a just acceptable speed.
Android and iOS are not only touch optimized but also far easier to run on lower end hardware. While linux and other desktop OS require more powerful hardware to run well.
Also besides performance, ARM offerings are still 32bit processors, only now are they starting to make the switch to 64bit and for now it’s mainly just for improving memory management.Â
Most GPU’s used by ARM systems weren’t made to run the full range of graphic standards that desktop OS requires but that should start changing as they get ready for Windows 8.
SSDs used by many of these ARM systems are not very fast. So that’s another performance bottleneck they have to get over.
While all this performance increasing will start eating away at the ARM power efficiency advantage, especially with a OS that isn’t made to take advantage of those features. Like Windows wouldn’t let a ARM system ever fully idle the way it works now. Hopefully they’ll address that with Windows 8, but many linux distros would also have to be optimized as well for making the most of the ARM hardware or you’ll see much less run time than Android provides.