Lenovo Releases Tablets: IdeaPad K1 & ThinkPad with Android, IdeaPad P1 with Windows

Lenovo has released its first Android tablets for the US market – the consumer-class IdeaPad K1 and business-oriented ThinkPad Tablet, as well as the IdeaPad P1, their first Windows OS-powered slate.

Lenovo IdeaPad K1, P1, ThinkPad TabletBoth the K1 and ThinkPad Tablet run Android 3.1 Honeycomb version on 10.1-inch 1280×800 IPS multitouch displays and are based on the Nvidia Tegra 2 platform with a 1GHz dual-core CPU and 1080p HD video support.

The former has a curved design with white, red, and black color choices available, up to 10 hours of battery life, and a microSD card reader, while the latter has a rectangular look with some physical buttons on the front, up to 8 hours battery life, and full-size SD card slot and USB 2.0 port. The devices weigh slightly more than 1.6 pounds and have up to 64GB of storage, front 2MP and rear 5MP cameras, Wi-Fi connectivity, and mini-HDMI output. The ThinkPad additionally supports pen input and provides corporate-class security features, such as SD card encryption and Computrace anti-theft software. Also, it has access to Lenovo’s enterprise-class ThinkPlus support and can be accompanied by a keyboard dock with an optical trackpoint, while 3G mobile broadband will be present in future models.

As one of advantages of the tablets over the competition, Lenovo lists their Netflix certification and built-in Digital Rights Management (DRM), enabling ability to stream Netflix videos on an external display via HDMI.

On both devices, Lenovo has pre-loaded various productivity, entertainment, and communication applications, a custom app launcher, as well as access to Lenovo-branded app store besides standard Android Market.

On the other side, there’s no much info on the Windows-based 10.1-inch multitouch IdeaPad P1. It is known that it will sport an Intel Atom 1.5GHz processor and a weight of less than 2 pounds.

The 32GB IdeaPad Tablet K1 is priced at $499 and is available now, while the other configurations will be available in the US in August 2011.

The 16GB ThinkPad Tablet costs $479 without the digitizer pen and $509 with it, whereas the 32GB edition with pen is $589. Optional keyboard dock for the ThinkPad is $99. The first models will be available for purchase the U.S. starting August 2 and general availability is scheduled for the next month. 3G models will start shipping soon after, according to Lenovo.

The IdeaPad P1 will hit the US market in the Q4 2011.

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