Lenovo K1 Ideapad 130422U 10.1-Inch Tablet (Black)
Intel has been busy showing off its reference design for the Medfield mobile processor — the first of its kind to be released by Intel. This puts the company in direct competition with ARM — the current leader in the mobile technology industry that Intel has been trying to compete with for a long time. Conversely, ARM is looking to scale up to take over the PC industry at some point.
Chinese company Lenovo has announced the first ever mass market smartphone to running on Intel’s Medfield mobile processor. It will also be the first Intel-powered phone to be released in their world when it arrives in China during the second quarter this year. The phone will be called the K800 and it will be running on Android, possible 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The demo version was running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Featuring a custom UI design, the underlying Android OS is not immediately apparent when you look at the phone.
Lenovo was surprising pick for Intel as a smartphone manufacturer. The company has hardly any experience in the field to command this position.
Lenovo’s K800 will follow the design cues from the company’s popular IdeaPad series of laptops and will hence have an angular frame design. It will be a rather large device with a screen size of 4.5 inches with a native resolution of 1280×720 pixels. According to the hands reviews, the video display was large, smooth and vibrant in colors too.
The homescreen has been specially designed by Lenovo to give quick access to calls, text messages, instant messaging and emails. There’s an icon in the middle of the four options that are arranged in a grid and this icon gives access to the contact list. This special UI is handy and there are options for customizations as well. But on the downside, special UI layers on top of an OS tend to suck out battery life as it happens with the Sense UI on HTC Android phones. So it remains to be seen if the K800 will also face the same problems.
The phone leaves no room for complaints regarding the performance, which is quite fast thanks to the 1.6GHz Atom Medfield Processor that is more than enough to run the simple applications and crunch the graphics.
The IdeaPad K210 tablet would also be running on Intel and would likely become one of the first tablets to be based on the Medfield chip. The demo version at CES is running on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which is exactly what it will have when it releases later this year. It is one of the few tablets out there right now to have Android 4.0 ICS on them. The tablet has front and rear cameras but the pixel details are not available at the moment.
This Lenovo tablet is smaller the industry average of about 9-10inches. It measures 8.9 inches and is about as thick as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is 10.1 inches by comparison. The K210 is expected to come to the market with a full release some time in the second half of 2012.
