Lenovo had a big launch yesterday at the Mumbai Flying Club to announce the release of three tablets in the country. The Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet 64GB will sell for Rs 46,900 ($954) and is aimed at business users, with both 3G and Wi-fi versions. The other two are consumer-oriented, and less pricey: the K1 is priced at Rs. 29,990 ($610), and the A1 costs Rs 14,990 ($305).
The Lenovo Thinkpad tablet – which runs Android 3.1 – is the business beast, and uses a 10-inch (1280×800 resolution) IPS panel with scratch-proof Corning Gorilla Glass. IPS panels are well-known for good color reproduction and wide viewing angles – indeed Lenovo claims 178 degrees of viewability! But the glass surface is reflective, and visibility does tend to decrease in a bright room or during outdoor use. Like many tablets, it does tend to be a fingerprint magnet. When I asked Lenovo India staffers at the launch about this, they said the R&D department is “working on it.”
For business…
Lenovo shows off new tablets at Mumbai Flying Club
Other business-class features for this Nvidia Tegra 2-powered tablet include the Good Technologies “easy and secure” email access, Cisco VPN support for securely accessing company networks, Microsoft ActiveSync, and the ability to encrypt user’s data on both the internal storage and the SD cards. Both come with 16GB of SSD storage. Lenovo promises up to 8.7 hours of battery life for the WiFi version.
For pleasure…
The K1 has the same size screen and other key specs – and also runs Android 3.1 – but is aimed at regular folk who want a fun tablet. There’s the option of 16- or 32GB of SSD storage. You can see a quick promo video for the K1 at the bottom of this post.
The smaller Lenovo’s A1 has a 7-inch (1024×600 resolution) display with battery life of up to 5 hours, and weighs less than 420 grams. It runs only Android 2.3 – which was designed for smartphones, not tablets – and, according to Lenovo, is powered by Texas Instrument’s 1 GHz OMAP 3622 processor. Although cheaper and less powerful than the other two slates, this one still has 3G and Wi-fi connectivity support. There’s also a 0.3 megapixel camera on the front and a 3.0 megapixel one to the rear.
All three tablets comes with a set of pre-loaded Android software and Lenovo apps. For example, there’s GPS with offline maps, and Lenovo’s SocialTouch software that gives the end user quick access to their favorite social networking sites within a single application.
Focus on India
Lenovo also paid their respects to Steve Jobs, and called him a great innovator in the industry.
Lenovo India made it clear that they’re keen on establishing a strong market presence in India, including service support in many cities, and the company has started ad campaigns in newspapers, on TV, and online.
The company also said that they don’t intend to label it as a PC killer, let alone the cliché of an “iPad killer.” Rajiv Rao, director of Lenovo India’s SMB department, said during the launch that there is a distinct place for tablets, notebooks, and netbooks. Lenovo representatives did say they’re in fourth position in the PC market overall in India but they’re aiming for first.
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