Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet

Lenovo hasn’t come onto the tablet market to follow trends or do things the easy way. Rather, the brand has transposed its usual philosophy to an Android Honeycomb (3.1) touchscreen tablet. Resolutely high-end and professional in its marketing positioning, this ThinkPad Tablet has numerous connectors and includes a stylus (capacitive interface, sensitivity to pressure).

In a 10.1-inch 16/10 format, it has an IPS panel and a capacitive touchscreen. The processor is an Nvidia Tegra2 dual-core clocked at 1 GHz in keeping with the 2011 trend for Android Honeycomb products. It also comes with 1 GB of RAM. For storage, our test model had 64 GB, but 16 and 32 GB models are also available.

In addition to its large stylus there’s a whole lot of other connectivity, to an extent we hadn’t seen since the release of the Acer Iconia Tab A500. The USB 2.0 Host, micro-USB, SD/SDHC reader, proprietary connection for the dock and accessories, a mini-HDMI out, a 3.5-inch headphones jack and a SIM slot for 3G connectivity… Lenovo certainly isn’t scrimping when it comes to the hardware!
Photo–video sensors are of course included, with the main one on the back (5 Megapixels) and a webcam on the front (1.3 Megapixels).  

The Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 64 GB is available for around £640 with the 16 and 32 GB versions coming in at around £470 and £550 respectively.  

Design & Handling

Out of the box, the ThinkPad Tablet is strangely reminiscent of the false tablet made for 2001 A Space Odyssey that Samsung used to ridicule Apple’s suit against its Galaxy Tab 10.1. With a very angular look, the Lenovo has four clickable physical buttons on its base, all of different sizes: two small buttons to lock the display and launch the browser, one enormous one to go back and one medium-sized one to return to the home page.

This finish and interface push users to adopt portrait mode. It has to be said that it isn’t all that intuitive at first but entering text in landscape mode means that the physical buttons necessarily fall under the thumb on one hand or the other.

On the left hand side, in portrait mode, there’s a cover for the USB Host 2.0 port. The rest of the connectivity is underneath the physical buttons. There’s a second cover here for the SD/SDHC card reader as well as the SIM card slot. The SIM card slots in easily, in contrast to most other 3G tablets.
The stylus can be tidied away on the upper part of the device at the back. It’s rather big but is simpler and lighter to use than the stylus that equips the HTC Flyer.

Austere or sober depending on your point of view, the ThinkPad Tablet is only brightened up by the red diode positioned at the dot of the “I” on the logo on the back. Its size, shape and weight mark the ThinkPad Tablet out from the slimline trends you find on competition 10.1-inch tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab or the Toshiba AT200 and the forthcoming Asus EeePad Transformer Prime. 

Weighing in at 725 grammes, the ThinkPad Tablet certainly makes its presence felt. The soft touch finish however makes it very nice to handle. Note also that the very glossy tablet screen isn’t perhaps the best choice for a pro product.
For the general consumer, going for a glossy screen – systematic with almost all tablet manufacturers - is already a shame but when you’re positioning your product for the pro market, this choice is even more disappointing.

Screen 

By going for an IPS panel, Lenovo at once qualifies its ThinkPad Tablet as being on the right side of average when it comes to screen contrast. With an average ratio of 811:1 and almost perfect colour temperature of 6480 Kelvins (AND a flat temperature curve), this screen has plenty going for it.
The deltaE (colour accuracy, under 3 indicates accurate colours) is far from perfect but this isn’t surprising for a tablet. With an average score of 5.8, the ThinkPad Tablet doesn’t have anything to blush about in comparison to the iPad 2, the EeePad Transformer or the Galaxy Tab, which are all fairly similar here.  
A ghosting time of 26 ms is unfortunately above the standard 17-20 ms.

Well balanced without being transcendent, the ThinkPad Tablet screen can also boast strong LED backlighting. With maximum brightness of 423 cd/m², Lenovo has really gone for it here and the tablet can therefore be used outside comfortably (all the more reason not to go for a glossy screen surely!).

Interface & Navigation

With Android Honeycomb 3.1 slung over the shoulder, the ThinkPad Tablet doesn’t offer any particular implementation of the Google OS, but does include several additions. We therefore have the same OS as we’re used to seeing, namely a group of five panels to which you can add shortcuts, widgets and rapid players. Nothing has changed, whether this be on the applications page or in the settings, with just an additional setting for the micro-USB (mass storage, transfers, loading).

Lenovo has however added a few of its own applications and widgets. There’s a home screen that allows you to access your mail, videos, e-books, notes, connectivity settings and so on rapidly and there’s a widget for mails. This doubles up on the one offered by Google, though with a different design.

There’s also a wheel with your favourites available at any time via touch access in the middle of the lower part of the screen, which is a nice addition. You can choose the content, which is displayed in a carousel of thumbnails of your favourite applications.

Note also the intuitive management of multitasking with the option of killing apps or pages in Android multitasking by tapping on a red cross, whereas the standard Honeycomb solution requires you to go into the settings and applications menu. Another application lets you access content from a peripheral connected by USB, while the PrinterShare application offers the option of printing content on a printer connected via wi-fi.

Lenovo has also created its own applications store, the App Shop, which, like Sony‘s App Planet for Tablet S, brings together all pertinent ThinkPad Tablet content from Android Market. There’s also a social network tool, the Document To Go application to read and edit word processor or spreadsheet type documents and McAffee Mobile Security (antivirus protection, data backup and so on).

Taking notes using the on-the-fly handwriting conversion is the choice feature on this device. The app uses a paper notepad type presentation. The thickness of your pen strength and its colour can be set and the software recognises over twenty languages! The stylus and different amounts of pressure make it possible to play with the look of your handwriting.

There are two available modes: free and handwriting recognition. The first mode puts the technical prowess of the capacitive touchscreen interface and the very precise stylus to good use, while the second adds what can sometimes be hugely impressive (but also capricious) handwriting recognition to convert your writing into nicely aligned lettering. Several of us in editorial tried to trick the system and we have to say that it gave a very good showing. You can also set the tablet for left or right-handed users, which is obviously essential for optimal functioning of the application.

Bad handwriting can still pose a certain problem (we’re not naming any names!) and there's some variation depending on the language chosen. Note however English is recognised whatever the language preset.

When it comes to navigation the ThinkPad Tablet suffers from some recurrent issues when moving between desktops or applications that are open during multitasking and there’s often some latency when coming out of standby.
Slowdowns can also appear during note taking but they're barely noticeable. Using a ThinkPad Tablet is however less fluid than a Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is equipped with the same processor.
Another disappointment, in view of the fact that the ThinkPad Tablet is a pro product, is that with Document To Go, Lenovo has gone for a suite that is rather too lite, too general consumer orientated and with too many compatibility bugs for our liking. It doesn't deliver the sort of service you’d expect for a pro market.

Multimedia

Unlike some of the Honeycomb tablets we've seen, the ThinkPad Tablet is nothing special when it comes to Internet navigation, whether with 3G or wi-fi. Indeed it's one of the slowest 2011 Android tablets we've seen. While not terrible, it doesn’t stand up to comparison with, say, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 browser.
The display is nice in both portrait and landscape mode, without having superb definition. Pages can be read easily enough without requiring too much use of the zoom, which does however lack a bit of fluidity and precision.

Lenovo has gone for dedicated players for music and video, though these are actually just skins for the Honeycomb media content, which makes this the basic Android pack in terms of audio-video decoding: pm4, MPEG-4, H.264 (theoretically up to low profile 1080p).
For other file formats you’ll need to get a player from Android market.

The 5 Megapixel sensor is just about okay, bordering on mediocre. Lack of colour and finesse and the fact that there’s no flash mean it struggles in low lighting, giving a blurred mix of pixels.
Video capture, up to 720p, lacks responsiveness. The image sticks and there’s plenty of ghosting.
Inserting an SD/SDHC card gives access to a nicely designed, simple intuitive file transfer window. You can thus exchange content on the fly quite easily and the same goes for the USB port with external storage.

Battery life

A pro machine maybe but the battery life isn’t as good as some of the market leaders (3250 mAh battery). For pure video playback, the ThinkPad Tablet lasts just 7h40 with wi-fi on and manages a little over 8 hours without wi-fi. You get pretty much the same for mixed usage.
Once you switch to 3G however, the battery life drops by about a couple of hours. Thankfully you can close the network connectivity off easily from the home screen. In the end then, you're looking at one or two hours less than models such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1, the iPad 2 or the Xoom.
As is often the case, standby performance oscillates between acceptable and excessive loss of power when you don't touch the tablet for a few hours.