Lenovo IdeaPad S2 is thin, light, has a transformer dock
Whops, sorry, I didn’t mean transformer dock, I meant…keyboard dock…with a hinge…clamdock? Oh screw it, there’s no way anyone will look at this and not see ripoff of the Asus Transformer concept. Luckily, ripping off one another is what the players in the electronics business do 24/7 anyways. The IdeaPad S2 is an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with a 1.5GHz Snapdragon chip, a 10-inch 1280 x 800 screen, 1GB of RAM, 3G (with call support, of all things – talk about giant phone), dual cameras, micro-HDMI, and up to 64GB of storagey. The sleek 8.69mm, 580 gram tablet fits in its own keyboard dock which bumps the battery life up from 9 to 20 hours, adds two USB slots and an SDHC slot, and gives you a trackpad (and naturally a keyboard) to play with.
The lack of Tegra 3 doesn’t necessarily make this a lesser choice than the Asus Transformer Prime, as other chips are quite capable of keeping up with the Android software at this point. The low thickness and weight also puts this up there with the big guys, and everything generally seems to be in place on this one. Still, I hope this isn’t an indicator of what’s coming from other companies at CES this week; while it’s a nice contender to the Transformer series, it doesn’t really add much extra. Last year we saw the Xoom kick off what turned out to be a series of practically identical tablets, a trend only broken later in the year by features such as the Transformer dock, IR blasters, digitizers etc. Innovate, don’t replicate! Being a CES item, pricing and launch date can range anywhere from next week @ $49 to September, 2137 @ $999,999.
[Engadget]
