Product spotlight: Lenovo IdeaPad K1

As the young tablet industry kicks on, China-based tech firm Lenovo is the latest to throw its hat in the ring. The IdeaPad K1 is yet another Android-based entrant into the market — the Honeycomb OS already fills the slates of Toshiba, Samsung, Sony, Motorola, Acer and Asus. Lenovo enjoys a loyal following and waited a while to create its own tab. Now that it has, armed with an economical price point, innovative layout and stylish façade, fans should be pleased.

The deep-red back panel gives the tab a handsome feel. Coupled with the generous 10.1-inch screen, the IdeaPad seems a more serious piece of hardware than the price tag what’s the price? would suggest. There is considerable glare off the screen, which is a minus, but generally the viewing panel is aesthetically adept. A two-cell battery gives the tab ten hours of battery life — a justified feature considering the 0.7kg weight, making it heavier than your average pad, and fairly denser as well. One aspect that has amazingly become somewhat standard in current tablets is a 5MP camera at the back with a 2MP facing the front. This tablet ticks that box as well.

Down to the insides — a 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor accompanies 1GB of RAM, making it a relatively competent machine. Lenovo has played around with the Honeycomb OS layout on this tablet. A five-way app launcher is the central figure on the home screen. This mini medusa-head of buttons is a collection of what are deemed the most common functions — the browser, email, YouTube, music and video. This is a handy feature, perhaps more oriented towards the less techie with its emphasis on layman accessibility. The setting can be changed around however.

The shortcut features also direct you to a social media aggregator of sorts where Twitter, Facebook and email feeds are all centralised into one notification column. It’s a godsend if you are so frantically active on all three social mediums that switching from one to the other could result in irreparable carpal tunnel. It’s a neat feature for status-update addicts.

There are plenty of built-in apps in the mix — AccuWeather, Amazon Kindle, Documents to Go 3.0, Angry Birds HD, Need for Speed Shift, and a spate
of others.

There is an audible bang for your buck with the Lenovo IdeaPad. It does all the things that tablets do and throws in a bunch of soft add-ons to sweeten the package. It might not look as silky and polished as the iPad, but it does much of the same and should successfully service the market it is targeting.