Lenovo ThinkPad 2 : Not so great, but decent

Lenovo ThinkPad 2 is the latest tablet from the tier brand Lenovo. It is a combination of all-day battery life, touch and the Windows 8 style. The main rivals are Dell Latitude and Microsoft Surface Pro. From the features we can say that the rivals have an upper hand. 

The battery life is higher for Lenovo ThinkPad 2 than the rivals. Looking the overall features we can say the device is good but not up to the mark. Let’s take a look at its different specs and features.

Design and features

The ThinkPad looks like a professional tab, with a black Polycarbonate frame over the internal magnesium frame. The tab measures about 7 by 10.5 by 0.34 inches (HWD) and weighs a scant 1.21 pounds alone. It has a built-in slot to carry its stylus. The device is easy to carry and handle.

The ThinkPad 2 has a micro-USB port for charging, MicroSD, mini HDMI out port, a docking port, volume, power, rotate lock, a low-power USB and a SIM port on its side. The SIM slot also supplies authentication to an optional WWAN radio.

The device is also featured with a Bluetooth keyboard, which is very useful. It is very comfortable, it has an inbuilt optical TrackPoint and mouse buttons. The keyboard has no palm rest, so it is best for tabletops. The device has very low-grip, so if you keep it on your lap, be careful it may slip. The tablet has two slits to fit the keyboard on the tab.

The Bluetooth keyboard has its own batteries like Bluetooth. It doesn’t   auxiliary power like the keyboard docks for the HP Envy or Acer Iconia W510.

The ThinkPad 2 is charged using a micro-USB charger, which is used in almost all tablets and smartphones today. This makes it a multi charger. It can be also charged using PC with USB cable also.

Lenovo offers an extra vehicle charger with the tablet at $ 20 for charging, when you are in your vehicle.

The ThinkPad 2 has a regular 2.0 USB port seen in laps and PC’s. So you can connect your printers, mouse, keyboard and Pen drives with the device. 

But the port supplies only a few watts on power, so you can’t plug large external drives to the tablet. This regular port can be found with only a few tabs, so it is a plus for the device. But the main rivals including Dell Latitude has full power USB ports. Some of the other Ultrabooks also have full power ports, although if they are mini.

The ThinkPad 2 can be connected to 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 is also supported, though they are not widely available. GPS is also included.

The ThinkPad 2 has 10.1-inch screen, which has an IPS display with a 1,366-by-768 resolution. You can playback 720p HD content, but 1080p content will be scaled down.

The device has a 5-finger multitouch display. When the stylus comes close to the screen to the screen, the capacitive touch sensors turn off, so you aren't making marks with your palm when you're actually drawing on the screen with the stylus.

The device has a bright screen, with a wide angle view from all sides. The accelerometer makes sure that screen elements point up at all times.

The ThinkPad 2 comes with sensors such as Compass, Ambient light sensor, Proximity sensor, and Sensor hub. It is also featured with Bluetooth 4.0.

Performance

The ThinkPad 2 is featured with a 1.80GHz Intel Atom Z2760 processor. The device has LPDD2 SD RAM of 2GB and 64GB of storage. That is a bit less, when compared to the rivals. 

In the device every bit of space is precious, because it is 33.4GB of 50GB after the partition and the installation of apps. This happened because; the OS uses more than 16GB of space. The only way to recover the space problem is adding a MicroSD.

There are many pre-installed apps such as Lenovo Companion, Skitch Touch, Evernote Touch, Lenovo Support, Accuweather, Amazon Kindle, Skype, rara.com, a Lenovo Settings app, Intel AppUp, Lenovo Cloud Storage (SugarSync), QuickSnip (clipping/screenshot utility) and Norton Studio (security). There is another Lenovo app which acts like start menu in Windows 7, named as Lenovo Quicklaunch.

The ThinkPad 2 comes with a 2MP camera in the front and an 8MP camera with LED flash in the rear. Lenovo offers a one year standard warranty for the device.

The Intel Atom Z2760 processor supports only 32-bit operating system. Today many 32-bit Windows 8 software and applications are available in market, so that feature is a good one. The ThinkPad 2 didn’t limit your internet browsing to Internet Explorer, as you can use many others.

Like all other Atom processor tabs, Lenovo ThinkPad also offers a 10-hour battery life. This also means that it is not well working with multimedia apps and softwares. We can surely say that most of the rivals have their own market above ThinkPad 2. See this chart to know the ThinkPad 2’s and its rival’s performance.

After Words

·         We can say that ThinkPad 2 is a decent Windows 8 tab. It doesn’t have any distinctive features, but is able to compete with Atom powered rivals. One of the best features of the tab is that, it is more portable than the other rivals. It performance is only average, but is still a good tab at the price point of $729.

     Watch this video to know more about the tablet>>>