LeTablet
Despite being one of the pioneers in the business of sticking mobile phone chip in larger computing devices, giant Chinese OEM Lenovo has been conspicuously absent from this year's tablet stampede. But if a comprehensive leak published by ex-Engadget hack Joanna Stern is taken at face-value, that's set to change this summer.
It's being positioned as the ‘ThinkPad Commercial Media Tablet' (how inconvenient for Lenovo that it calls its notebooks ThinkPad), which looks like an attempt to sit on the fence and position it as both a professional and leisure device.
The tablet will run Android 3.0 with a Lenovo skin that looks like an evolution of the interface on the mobile devices Lenovo launched way back at CES 2010. Like the U1 it will be a tablet with a keyboard dock, but there's no dual-chip, dual OS nonsense this time. Furthermore Qualcomm, which Lenovo seemed so chummy with a year ago, has been dumped in favour of the NVIDIA Tegra 2.
The main concessions to the professional user are the keyboard dock, which seems to be a ‘slide-in' affair, a smart-pen type of peripheral, and plenty of software support for the likes of Cisco's enterprise software, security apps, etc.
The image below, taken from the story alongside the lead image, shows suggested pricing and availability. $500 seems to be the most that can reasonably be charged for a basic-spec Honeycomb tablet, and the peripherals are extra. Apparently these slides are a few months old (despite a 2009 date on some of them), but the proposed launch dates imply the Lenovo tablet will join a bunch of other tablet launches at this year's Computex.
On another note, how much must it be amusing AOL to see ex-Engadget journalists get so much exposure for stories before they've even started their new project. The site this leak was published on is just somewhere for Joshua Topolsky and co to keep busy while their main project is worked on. It will be interesting to see if Engadget can maintain its prominence in the face of such a mass defection.
