Lenovo IdeaTab S2: ASUS Transformer form factor, 20 hour battery life

Sexy!

CES 2012 is on right now in the US of A, and the first piece of news that has caught my eye is the announcement of Lenovo's IdeaTab S2. As The Verge describes it, the IdeaTab is "a 10.1-inch, dual-core Android 4.0 tablet with keyboard dock attachment." While Lenovo is a relative unknown here in New Zealand, this caught my eye - Read on for the breakdown.

• I do believe this is the first product to use a chip from Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 range, in this case the dual-core MSM8960, with each core clocked at 1.5ghz. It's not the quad-core found in the ASUS Transformer Prime, to be sure, but word on the street is that with the magic Qualcomm's been working, that might not matter - depending on time to market, of course.

• They're promising 20 hours of battery life out of this thing. The original flavour ASUS Transformer promised 16 with dock, and the Prime promises 18, but this one shoots for a further two hours. Ambitious stuff.

• It's running a seemingly Metro UI-inspired skin atop Ice Cream Sandwich, which Lenovo call 'Mondrian' (Appropriately, this was the working name for one of HTC's Windows Phones. As well as the famous Dutch painter, of course). Whether this makes Android a little more capable and productivity-centric remains to be seen.

• Just like the Transformer series, the IdeaPad has a removable keyboard dock for that oh-so-chic portable Android netbook factor. It's the future of computing, today, folks - or at least that's what we at Android NZ believe.

No word on pricing or availability just yet, and I doubt it'll see retail here, yet it's great to see my preferred form factor for tablets spread beyond ASUS. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing this style of tablet +keyboard dock coupled with the genuine productivity and real windowed multitasking that Windows 8 is promising - here's hoping Android accomplishes the same things sooner rather than later.