Lenovo Tablets Have HD Video, 10.1-Inch Screens, Netflix Streaming

Touting the first Android tablets certified for Netflix streaming, Lenovo began Wednesday selling an Android 3.1-based tablet, one of three tablets the company plans to have in the market this year as part of a strategy designed to offer “something for everyone,” according to Ninis Samuel, Lenovo global director of product marketing. Instead of offering a “one size fits-all” tablet like others currently on the market, Samuel said that Lenovo is offering “a full family of tablets” for entertainment, for business “or both.” He emphasized “choice, flexibility and highly customizable options.” The two tablets available this summer are Android-based -- one for business and one consumer -- and a third, due out in Q4, will be a Windows 7 model, Lenovo said.

The first Lenovo tablet to market, the $449 IdeaPad K1, with a 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 display, comes pre-loaded with 40 apps valued at more than $50, according to Samuel. The tablet will be sold at Lenovo.com, Office Depot and elsewhere, Samuel said. The company didn’t reference a wireless-carrier version in the announcement webcast, but there’s a SIM card port on the device, according to the product spec sheet. The brain of the K1 is an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1-GHz processor. The graphics processor is an Nvidia GeForce, according to specs. Onboard memory is “up to one gigabyte” with 16-64 gigabytes of storage. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are built in along with a mini HDMI port, microSD card reader, docking port and two Web cameras: a two-megapixel rear-facing lens and a five-megapixel front-facing lens. Support for Adobe Flash is included for “full web browsing,” Samuel said, in a dig toward the iPad.

Lenovo “did a lot of work around DRM —- something other devices don’t have,” to beef up the entertainment value, Samuel said. Users can output video and photo content to a TV or computer monitor via the mini HDMI slot, he said. The K1 tablet has an aluminum case, is 13.3 millimeters thick and weighs 1.6 pounds, he said. Battery life is given as 10 hours.

By pre-loading the tablets with apps, Lenovo is trying to differentiate itself in the crowded tablet field by making its tablets ready to use out of the box, “so you don’t have to spend hours to get the tablet up and running,” Samuel said. Apps include Netflix, Slacker, Adobe, Rovio, Zinio, Kindle reader and the ubiquitous Angry Birds. App partners vary according to country. Lenovo is also offering two gigabytes of cloud storage from ArcSync for free, although the ArcSync website says the company by rule offers four gigabytes of cloud storage free for PC users. In addition to the quarter million apps available from Android Market, Lenovo offers its own app store, which it says offers Android apps that have been tested and validated for Lenovo tablets.

For business customers, Lenovo is marrying multimedia entertainment to ThinkPad security and keyboard features, said Dilip Bhatia, vice president, Think product group. Bhatia noted that the Android-based enterprise version, called ThinkPad Tablet, has the multimedia features of the consumer version but is the “first business-class tablet” that can “take advantage of downtime for business people” for use outside of work. For productivity, the ThinkPad Tablet is offered with an optional capacitive pen, which tucks into the case, for note-taking and for document signing. Notes are converted to text with Notes Mobile, Bhatia said. An optical track point, like the one found on Lenovo laptops, is located between the G and H keys, he said. Documents to Go is part of the pre-loaded app bundle. The business version adds Corning Gorilla Glass and is listed with an eight-hour battery life. Availability is August, Bhatia said.

Lenovo consulted with IT managers on the business tablet, and that led to features including a USB slot and full-size SD card reader “to make it easy to share,” Bhatia said. “IT guys didn’t want to buy a lot of custom cables,” he explained. With the built-in USB copy utility, users can drag and drop files from a USB thumb drive to internal storage or an SD card, he said. Users can sync files and folders with a PC, which addresses one of the “pain points” for IT managers: deploying multiple devices simultaneously. Lenovo’s solution includes the “Zero Touch” deployment process that enables administrators to ready 100 devices at once, he said. A security feature enables IT administrators to disable a tablet that’s been lost or stolen and to disable individual ports “as needed,” he said. The tablet operates over a Cisco Virtual Private Network and is certified by Good Technology for secure email access, Bhatia said.