With the market flooded with all kinds of tablets, most people felt they still didn’t have a tablet that focused on the business person, that’s when Lenovo came out with their own tablet The Thinkpad, but will this tablet satisfied the business man’s needs?
Design
The Thinkpad tablet has a 10.1 Gorilla Glass display screen, 1280×800 screen resolution, has an automatic brightness control so if it’s too dark in the room the screen adjust the lighting. Now the Thinkpad tablet is a little thicker than my Samsung Galaxy 10.1 and weighing at 1.58 is a little heavier, it’s also a little taller than the Galaxy Tablet. The tablet has a sturdy feel to it, on the back you will find a slot where the ThinkPad pen is held. The back has a nice smooth rubber feeling that gives an easy grip to it, you also have the Thinkpad logo on the back.
Hardware
The Thinkpad comes with Android 3.1, you have two option’s when it comes to WiFi, you can get just WiFi or WiFi with 3G. You have a NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core ARM processor, a front camera which is 2MP and the rear facing camera is 5MP, The quality on the camera was nice a crisp while I was using Skype, the sound quality was actually pretty good. Now on the front of the Thinkpad you have four navigating buttons, I did try to use them but gave up after a while, the buttons are extremely stiff and I was getting annoyed, so I stuck to using the touch screen, right under the buttons is the SD reader and a 3G SIM card slot, docking connector, micro-USB port, mini-HDMI socket (1080p capable) and a headphone jack, on the top left hand corner is the buttons for the volume, the speaker is on the right side and the power button is on the left side of the tablet.
Experience
When turning on the Thinkpad it does take a while to load up, when on the web I did notice a sluggish performance even with one tab open, the home screen allows you to organize the apps you use frequently with the Lenovo Launcher, to edit the panes all you have to do is select the tog on the left side of the Lenovo Launcher and select one of the functions. The Lenovo also allows you to access your Androids settings with ease. Now I got a little more than 8 hours just surfing the web, on You tube and watching movies I got six and a half hours, not too bad compared to the other tablets.
The thinkpad tablet also has a pen, just like the HTC Flyer it uses N-Trig’s DuoSense digitizer to allow for both pen and touch input. The pen is sold separately for $30. The Pen has a cute red cap, it also has replaceable tips, be careful when opening the package, the tips are so small I almost didn’t notice them, they are also AAAA batteries that you have to put into the pen. There is an app called “My Script Notes†that is pre-installed, this app allows you to write E-mails, Facebook post and Twitter updates just to name a few, with your pen. I used this app for a couple of days and loved it, I didn’t have to press too hard on the screen, if you want to erase a word all you have to do is scribble through it.
This Tablet comes with a lot of pre-installed apps that are free and pretty usefully, one of them is Documents to Go which is $14.99 on Android Market, the others are Netflix, Zinio, Amazon MP3, G mail and Kindle for Android just to name a few. Of course you have the Andriod Market but you also have Lenovo App Shop, which is more for IT managers. USB File Transfer makes everything easier, it eliminates the need for you to use your home or work computer, the tablet allows you to select specific files or folders to drag and drop information into.
Overall
The Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet overall is a pretty good tablet for the business person, you get Documents to Go for free, easy transferring of work files to the tablet and the pen makes writing notes easier than typing them on the screen keyboard, Lenovo also offers a Thinkpad Keyboard for travel on their website. I will admit this tablet offers more apps and easy use for the business world; I’m just not too happy with the long loading and sluggish web performance, but for $499 it’s something worth checking out.