Lenovo Will Develop ThinkPad Windows 8 Tablets

Lenovo Will Develop ThinkPad Windows 8 Tablets - The CIO Report - WSJ

The Yoga was one of my favorite things to come out of CES.

 

All I want is a thin 10-11" tablet with 8-10 hours of battery life, with two options

1. A standalone thinkpad keyboard dock complete with trackpoint; makes this a hybrid X-series
2. A enterprise-type dock that with all the connectors and the ability to add a GPU to drive a monitor.

As an enterprise user, you would be able to have a tablet with you at all times and dock it for full desktop functionality. As a consumer you would have a tablet/laptop hybrid (Asus Transformer style)

I really hope someone like Lenovo gets this right

 

X230 tablet much? Converts into a tablet and can dock, whoop? And the X220 tablet already gets ~9 hours with light usage and an SSD so I would think X230 tablet would get better battery life.

 

This is exactly what I thought when I read this blurb. My hope is that this means they are putting some effort into making the x230t slimmer and lighter than the monstrosity that is the x220t.

 

It doesn't sing X230T to me. This sounds more like a Yoga/hybrid or pure slate with keyboard kind of deal; although less robust than the X counterpart (<3 my X220T), it will be slimmer and even more portable.

 

Enterprise Yoga-like convertible w/ULV CPU (even Haswell if it comes out next year?) and wacom pen or Transformer like Hybrid unit with Wacom, HD+ display and decent keyboard would be a winner for me.

 

I wouldn't call X220T tablet a "monstrosity". I spend a lot more time on it than my T410 or ThinkPad tablet. All of them are still operational thank goodness, but X220T has the best combination of power+touch interface. When you get used to efficient touch input (use pen and hands simultaneously) it's hard to turn back to the old ways. So, IMHO given the state of the market X220T is still one of the best out there *today* (likely not next year).

That said, as geeks we always consider hardware that's been released as "outdated". It's probably not fair to the designers of this hardware. But on the other hand, I voted with my dollars for their work. That should count for something.

In my opinion, Yoga or its sister models should try to address the following issues with X220T:

• X220T is too heavy for the tablet. I just held up my T410 and X220T in both hands and they weigh pretty much the same. This is not good enough for a tablet. Can they use a different compound for the motherboard or something? Perhaps, even sacrifice the chassis sturdiness for weight?
• Touch interface is still not fully robust yet. It reminds me of the era when we had first mice. They were big, heavy and square. Buttons were hard to press, the wire used to break often and they were excellent dust collectors. Touch interface is still in that initial phase when technology is too new to have excellent usability. It needs to improve in responsiveness (still slow), robustness (the mouse pointer sometimes disappears completely) and accuracy (edge effects).
• I understand that it's hard to make it slimmer but, I am sorry guys, 1 inch above the desk for any tablet is not thin enough. Find a solution.
• A folding convertible is likely more convenient than swivel. Swivel completely hides the keyboard which is undesirable. Plus, it takes too long to lift and swivel compared to folding.