Lenovo turns its hand to a ThinkPad Tablet

Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought IBM’s PC business, has announced a Tablet version of the popular ThinkPad X41 notebook.

Marking its first new ThinkPad since it bought the division last December, the X41 includes a full-size keyboard while keeping the weight down to 3.5lbs.

Lenovo claims this is 20 per cent lighter than its closest competitor. And with an eight-cell battery that adds another half a pound, outlasts its rivals by up to four hours – more than six hours in total.

‘The launch of the ThinkPad X41 Tablet marks a significant milestone for the Tablet PC platform and is a well-timed response to the growing demand we’re seeing for Tablet PC functionality,’ said Bill Mitchell, Corporate VP for mobile PC computing at Microsoft. ‘The ThinkPad brand has a distinguished history of industry-leading design and innovation and is a great notebook PC by itself – but augmented with Tablet PC features it really shines, especially in the enterprise market.’

ThinkPad X41 Tablet has an Intel Pentium M Low Voltage or Ultra Low Voltage processor, the Intel 915GM chipset, up to 1.5 GB of PC2-4200 DDR2 memory, and integrated graphics through the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900.

Tablet PCs never really found their stride in the mainstream PC market, but have found homes in niche vertical markets such as healthcare. Lenovo offers a range of optional extras to ensure the X41 meets the needs of these specialised areas. ThinkVantage technologies offer motion-sensitive monitoring to detect drops and knocks and can turn off the hard drive to ensure valuable data is not lost. There is also a suite of diagnostic and recovery tools that work independently of the operating system to help a user fix problem software crashes.

There is also the option for an integrated security chip to handle encryption, digital signatures and so on without impacting performance, and an on-board fingerprint reader is also on offer.

The X41 should be available from leading online retailers.