Lenovo to ship two mil tablets in 2011
Although Chinese giant Lenovo is attempting to compete with Apple in the tablet market, they don’t seem to be ready to manufacture and ship enough tablets to make a noticeable impact on Apple’s sales. Off the record, components suppliers have indicated to Digitimes that only 500,000 ThinkPad tablets will be shipped this year, and the majority of the other two million units are Lenovo IdeaPad K1s and IdeaPad A1 tablets. What is holding back production is that Lenovo wants to avoid oversupplying the market, and then being forced to slash prices in order to clear stockpiles, as happened with the HP TouchPad and now the Blackberry PlayBook. Lenovo K1 Ideapad 130422U 10.1-Inch Tablet (Black) will cost you $410.
Shame, since in our opinion Lenovo’s products are some of the best and most fully-featured alternatives to Apple’s tablets. For example the ThinkPad tablet is sufficiently chic for business use, and then there’s an all – important stylus for fine-grained control and hand-written input. Added to that, its keyboard case accessory transforms the ThinkPad into a very portable netbook-style device when intense writing tasks are the order of the day. Amazon sells this ThinkPad Tablet 1838 Android 3.1 32GB 10.1" for $546.
Then there are the K1 and A1 mid-range tablets for mainstream users. The A1 is Lenovo’s first budget Android tablet, priced at $199, though consumers are as yet cautious about cheap Android devices, and many are looking forward to Microsoft Windows 8, which will be optimized for both desktop and tablet use, and will offer a standardized experience instead of some budget manufacturer’s hit-and-miss Android functionality.
Related posts:
- Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet overview
- Lenovo IdeaPad 7 inch spotted (A1-07)
- Lenovo IdeaPad K1 launch
- Lenovo IdeaPad K1 review
- Lenovo IdeaPad S10 for $249.99
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