It may seem hard to believe, but one year ago at CES 2011 ASUS showed off the first generation of a new type of Android tablet that they dubbed the “Transformer”. By itself the Transformer wasn’t anything special, just another Android tablet running Honeycomb, but when it was paired with a keyboard dock it transformed (get it?) into a device that looked like an everyday laptop. The resulting combination, which gave you all the benefits of a tablet such as instant on and amazing battery life, plus the huge productivity gains that a full laptop keyboard offered, turned a lot of heads in the tech community. Last month the second generation, dubbed the “Transformer Prime”, launched and it further refined the concept along with being the first device to market with a quad core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor. When is another company going to take the Transformer concept and run with it?
Enter Lenovo, who just announced a device called the IdeaTab S2. Like the Transformer Prime is has a 10.1 inch screen and features a keyboard dock, but that’s where the similarities end. The S2 runs Android 4.0 out of the box, unlike the Transformer Prime which ships with Honeycomb and will eventually get Android 4.0 via a software update. The S2 also has a different chip under the hood, the dual core Qualcomm S4 MSM8960 processor. Now before you get all crazy and say 4 cores is better than 2 cores, remember that Qualcomm’s S4 processor features a pair of next generation “Krait” cores, that and it’s really difficult to judge a product before we get our actual hands on it. Other things of note are that the S2 by itself will get roughly 10 hours of battery life. The keyboard dock also comes with a 10 hour battery. Combine the two parts and you’re looking at 20 hours of battery life.
Now the big questions: When? And how much? Lenovo is saying Q2, and the price is still unknown.
[Via: Mark Guim]